Two macaques learned to keep time with various songs, which might point to how humans got their sense of rhythm. But some scientists doubt that the primates’ feat, which required extensive instruction, can give evolutionary clues
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/SarahKuta.png)
Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent
December 3, 2025 12:20 p.m.
For the study, the researchers worked with two adult male macaques that had previously been trained to tap in time with a metronome. [Sharp Photography via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rhesus…
Two macaques learned to keep time with various songs, which might point to how humans got their sense of rhythm. But some scientists doubt that the primates’ feat, which required extensive instruction, can give evolutionary clues
Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent
December 3, 2025 12:20 p.m.
For the study, the researchers worked with two adult male macaques that had previously been trained to tap in time with a metronome. Sharp Photography via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0
,_male,_Gokarna.jpg){kind=link}
With a bit of training, monkeys can learn to tap along to the beat of music.
The findings, published November 27 in the journal Science, suggest that the ability to perceive rhythm may be more common in the animal kingdom than previously thought. They also hint that humans’ sense of rhythm might have been passed down from our primate ancestors.
“The fact that this [beat-tapping] skill can be acquired through training has implications for our understanding of the evolutionary origins of human musicality,” study co-author Vani Rajendran, a neuroscientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, tells New Scientist’s James Woodford. The discovery may also aid “our knowledge of the brain structures and connections required to be able to tap along, or dance or sing, to music.”
Scientists had previously thought that only species capable of complex vocal learning, such as humans and songbirds, could synchronize their movements to a beat. But Rajendran and her colleagues wanted to explore this hypothesis with macaque monkeys—and they had the perfect test subjects for the job.
For the study, the scientists worked with two captive adult male macaques that had previously been trained to synchronize their tapping with a metronome, a device that clicks at regular intervals. The researchers wanted to know whether these monkeys could expand their repertoire and learn to tap along to more complex—and often subjective—musical beats.
Using juice or water as a reward, the researchers trained the macaques to move one of their hands in time with various acoustically complex sound sequences, followed by excerpts from real songs. Some of the tunes the macaques listened to include “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys and “A New England” by Billy Bragg. For comparison, the scientists ran the same tests with 18 human participants.
Both humans and macaques successfully tapped along to the beat of music. But while humans were able to do so without instruction, the monkeys required “extensive training” and still found the task to be “effortful,” the researchers write in the paper.
Do the findings disprove the vocal learning hypothesis? Not necessarily, but they do point to a “greater generalization and flexibility in rhythm perception beyond … what was previously assumed for non-vocal-learning species,” the researchers write.
They’ve come up with an idea that might help explain musical beat perception across a wider variety of species, including non-vocal learners. Under their “four components” hypothesis, any animal that can detect sound patterns, predict the next beat, act on what they’ve heard and coordinate all of these processes through reward-based reinforcement training might be capable of rhythmic musical perception.
Gisela Kaplan, an animal behavior researcher at the University of New England in Australia who wasn’t involved in the study, agrees that musical ability might be more widespread than thought and calls the new work convincing, per New Scientist.
But others remain skeptical about the link between tapping macaques and the evolution of musicality.
Writing in an accompanying commentary in Science, neuroscientist Asif Ghazanfar and musicologist Gavin Steingo, both at Princeton University and not involved with the research, question whether this type of study “can really reveal much about human behavioral evolution.”
“Could a monkey trained to ride a bike help to understand the evolution of human bike riding?” they write. “Studying this process would not uncover a monkey’s hidden capacity to ride a bike, but rather it would simply show how conditioning could make it adopt a human ability that was acquired through cultural evolution.”
Miguel Llorente, a psychologist at the University of Girona in Spain who was also not involved with the research, says the conclusions “should be taken with great caution.” In an expert reaction to the paper compiled by the Science Media Center (Spain), he calls out the “extremely small” sample size and the fact that the animals were trained over long periods to perform unnatural tasks.
“The work raises interesting questions, but it is still far from offering solid answers about the evolution of rhythm in primates,” he adds.
You Might Also Like
December 3, 2025
December 3, 2025
December 3, 2025
December 3, 2025
December 3, 2025