Many animals sing to communicate. But among mammals, rhythmic songs are left to humans—or so we thought. Scientists recently discovered that indris, also called singing lemurs, use rhythms in their songs too!
Indris prefer rhythms where all the notes are the same length or where one note is twice as long as another in a 1:2 note-length ratio. This second rhythm sounds like the “stomp-stomp-clap” of the song “We Will Rock You” by Queen.
Valeria Torti, one of the scientists who made this musical discovery, is excited by what we can learn from animals that make musical rhythms. “By looking for musical features in other species, we could build an ‘evolutionary tree’ of musical traits and understand how rhythm evolved in humans,” she says.