Chimpanzee drumming shares the building blocks of human musicality

A study co-led by the University of St Andrews has shown that wild chimpanzees drum with rhythm, and that chimpanzee drumming shares some rhythmic properties with human music.

The study, published today in Current Biology, also shows that chimpanzee subspecies living on the different sides of Africa drum with different rhythms.

Rainforest trees are supported by huge roots that form large flat buttresses. Chimpanzees drum with their hands and feet on these surfaces to send information that can carry over a kilometre through the dense forests.

Professor Catherine Hobaiter from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews, senior researcher co-leading the study said: “Making music is a fundamental part of what it means to be human—but we don’t know for how long we have been making music. Showing that chimpanzees share some of the fundamental properties of human musical rhythm in their drumming is an exciting step in understanding when and how we evolved this skill. Our findings suggest that our ability to drum rhythmically may have existed long before we were human.”

The study was a partnership between the University of St Andrews, the University of Vienna, and music evolution expert Prof. Andrea Ravignani from the Sapienza University of Rome and built on a previous study which showed that each chimpanzee has their own unique drumming style, and that drumming helps to keep others in their group updated about where they are and what they’re doing.

However, researchers wanted to know whether chimpanzees living in different groups had different drumming styles and if their drumming was rhythmic, like in human music.

To answer these questions, the authors gathered a unique-in-the-world new dataset of chimpanzee drumming from rainforests and savannah-woodlands across Africa, with drums from 11 communities across six different populations on the eastern and western sides of the continent.

Professor Hobaiter said: “This study is a great example of team science. It took decades of work from teams at each chimpanzee site to collect these drums. Together, that’s well over a century’s worth of effort to build this dataset.”

PhD student Vesta Eleuteri, who conducted the research, said: “While chimpanzees from west Africa­—like humans—often drum isochronously, which is when sounds occur one after another with the exact same amount of time between them: like the ticking of a clock, or the kick drum in electronic music. Chimpanzees from east Africa prefer to alternate short and long intervals in their drumming.”

The researchers found that chimpanzees from west Africa also drum more quickly than their eastern cousins.

Researchers believe this study provides a piece of the puzzle in understanding the origins and evolution of musicality.

The authors next hope to study how chimpanzees coordinate their hands and feet to make their different drumming rhythms, how these rhythms shape social behaviour, and the ways in which chimpanzees choose different trees to shape the sounds of their drumming.