Male and female gibbons sing a duet with each other

Large gibbons make sounds that synchronize and occur at regular intervals, musical qualities that were previously only seen in lemurs and humans.


Male and female Lar Gibbons sing duets with notes that are synchronized and sound at regular intervals. These are rhythmic qualities, like those found in human songs, that may indicate an evolutionary basis for the origin of music.

“I’m pretty sure the gibbon’s isochronic ability is better than mine,” says Andrea Ravignani of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, referring to the ability to sing notes that appear at regular intervals. This ability was previously noted in indri (indri indri), a type of lemur found in Madagascar and the only other primate whose calls exhibit distinct rhythms related to those found in human music.

Male and female gibbons regularly duet to establish territory and form social bonds. Ravignani and colleagues analyzed 215 songs recorded by 12 gibbons, four pairs of wild gibbons (Hibobats lar) in Thailand and two pairs in wildlife sanctuaries in Italy.

After separating male and female calls based on pitch, the researchers marked the starting point of each note. They measured how often notes are repeated at regular intervals, and how often male and female notes overlap during duets.

They found regular rhythms in all gibbon songs, although the males sang in more regular rhythms during duets than when singing solo. In duets, the singers’ and singers’ notes overlapped 16 to 18 percent of the time, which is more synchronization than chance.

The researchers also found a link between the two rhythmic qualities: females sing less regularly when their calls are more in line with those of males. This demonstrates that the rhythms of gibbons vary depending on the social context, says Ravignani.

The discovery suggests that evolution may have chosen such rhythmic abilities in primates as a way to coordinate vocal expressions, said Henkian Honing of the University of Amsterdam..

However, it is not clear whether the last common ancestor of primates had such abilities, or whether they appeared later as a result of convergent evolution, “associating with the same cognitive architecture,” says Simon Townsend of the University of Zurich.

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