the musical odyssey of species around the world

ARTE – SATURDAY DECEMBER 14 – 11:40 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

Songs of birds or whales, swing of parrots, dance of chimpanzees, chorus of lemurs… In nature, rhythm and music are everywhere. But do animals have musical ears? How do they perceive tempos and melodies, how do they sometimes create them? Are there musical characteristics common to humans and animals? For around ten years, these questions have intrigued researchers.

This documentary invites us to a choral song of the animal kingdom, on an international scale. A playlist that transports us across continents and oceans. In Japan, a primatologist is studying the rhythmic abilities of chimpanzees, who move spontaneously, nodding their heads, clapping their hands or tapping their feet rhythmically. Each individual has their own style of swaying, however. Macaques have not acquired this ability to dance.

In the Netherlands, a laboratory is deciphering the brain partition of rhythm perception in humans and non-human primates. In newborns of our species, it seems indeed innate. In the Netherlands again, another team is looking, in the vocalizations of the seal, for traces of the role of evolution in the appearance of musicality.

Now for the songbirds. In Canada, researchers are closely examining the way in which male zebra finches transmit to their young the pattern of their songs, the signature of each lineage – and the result of learning, therefore. In Scotland, a musician-researcher dissects the structure of the song of the hermit thrush, identifies parallels between human music and avian songs, and sometimes draws inspiration from them in her compositions.

The song of the whales

In Vienna, the festival of sows and their piglets is bugged: when the suckling pigs suckle and hear their mother’s grunts, what rhythms do they prefer? Other stars in this musical Noah’s Ark: among the lemurs of Madagascar, males and females sing in chorus, following rhythms that resemble our walks.

But the “Grammy Award” for best sense of animal rhythm, without a doubt, goes to a world-famous star: Snowball, a sulfur cockatoo. With its yellow crest and its milky whiteness, the psittaciform, since 2007, has set social networks alight with its breathtaking performances: to the music of Queen or the Backstreet Boys, there it raises its paw, waddles, dislocates its neck, swings his head up and down, from right to left, in a semi-circle… A perfectly synchronized choreography, rich in at least fourteen different dance steps. And all the more striking because the parrot learned it spontaneously, without training. How ? The mystery remains.

However, it is the plaintive song of the humpback whales that is our favorite − and their slow and hypnotic aquatic ballets. All males in the same group, a Scottish musician-researcher discovered, reproduce precisely the same song – chants that can last more than twenty hours. Proof that these cetaceans listen to each other and learn from their peers.

One downside, however, in this animal symphony: until now, researchers have accumulated more questions than answers. More than ever, they will need to continue to keep their ears open.