Beat-based dancing to music has evolutionary foundations in advanced vocal learning

(2024) 25:65 Patel BMC Neuroscience https://doi.org/10.1186/s12868-024-00843-6 BMC Neuroscience Open Access REVIEW Beat‑based dancing to music has evolutionary foundations in advanced vocal learning Aniruddh D. Patel1,2* Abstract Dancing to music is ancient and widespread in human cultures. While dance shows great cultural diversity, it often involves nonvocal rhythmic movements synchronized to musical beats in a predictive and tempo-flexible manner. To date, the only nonhuman animals known to spontaneously move to music in this way are parrots. This paper proposes that human-parrot similarities in movement to music and in the neurobiology of advanced vocal learning hold clues to the evolutionary foundations of human dance. The proposal draws on recent research on the neurobiology of parrot vocal learning by Jarvis and colleagues and on a recent cortical model for speech motor control by Hickock and colleagues. These two lines of work are synthesized to suggest that gene regulation changes associated with the evolution of a dorsal laryngeal pitch control pathway in ancestral humans fortuitously strengthened auditory-parietal cortical connections that support beat-based rhythmic processing. More generally, the proposal aims to explain how and why the evolution of strong forebrain auditory-motor integration in the service of learned vocal control led to a capacity and proclivity to synchronize nonvocal movements to the beat. The proposal specifies cortical brain pathways implicated in the origins of human beat-based dancing and leads to testable predictions and suggestions for future research. Keywords Rhythm, Evolution, Brain, Dance, Vocal learning, Parietal cortex, Synchrony, Speech Background Dance occurs in human societies around the world and is intimately related to music. While dance movements vary widely across cultures and eras, rhythmic coordination of such movements with musical beats is commonly observed [1, 2]. Rhythmic movement to beat-based music often emerges spontaneously in infancy or early childhood. (Throughout this paper “spontaneously” means “without reliance on formal *Correspondence: Aniruddh D. Patel 1 Department of Psychology, Tufts University, 490 Boston Ave., Medford, MA 02155, USA 2 Program in Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Canada training”, not “without reliance on social interaction”). At this age movements are not synchronized to beats, although movements can exhibit tempo flexibility, i.e., faster movements to faster-tempo music [3–5]. Beat-synchronized movement emerges spontaneously over the first decade of life [6]. Such synchronization is predictive and tempo flexible. Predictive means that rhythmic movements anticipate the beat with a high degree of temporal precision, as shown by the fact that people often bob, clap, or step very close to the time of beats, and often slightly ahead of the beat. Tempo flexible means that such predictive synchronization is maintained over a wide range of tempi. For example, one study found that Western dance music ranged from 94 to 176 beats per minute (BPM) [7], meaning © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Patel B MC Neuroscience (2024) 25:65 that people readily synchronize to beats across a tempo range of ± 30% relative to the middle of this range (135 BPM). Some people struggle with musical beat synchronization, likely due to a combination of experiential and genetic factors [8, 9], and the ability is enhanced by music or dance training [10]. However, a large majority of adults have this ability [9, 11]. When used in social situations such as group dancing and singing, the ability allows multiple individuals to synchronize rhythmic movements and/or sounds with each other, a collective behavior with measurable psychological and social consequences [12] that may have benefited human ancestors over the course of human evolution [13–15]. Humans are not the only dancing species. A number of non-human animals have behaviors that biologists call dance. Many examples come from birds: one empiricallystudied case is the multimodal courtship dance of male lyrebirds [16]. What can we learn about the evolution of human dance from cross-species research on dancing? One approach is to focus on homology, i.e., similar traits inherited from a common ancestor, and on convergence, i.e., similar traits arising independently in separate lineages. In terms of homology, it is notable that chimpanzees (who along with bonobos are our closest living relatives) sometimes produce a rhythmic “rain dance” in the wild in response to loud sounds such as thunder, rain, or waterfalls [17, 18]. While such sounds are not beatbased, laboratory experiments show that complex beatbased rhythms can elicit spontaneous swaying, clapping, or other rhythmic movements in adult chimpanzees, with faster auditory rhythms eliciting faster rhythmic movement [19, 20]. However, such movements are not synchronized to beats and occur even when the rhythms are scrambled and lack an underlying beat. Given the small number of animals studied in this research, more research is needed in order to understand how rhythmic movements in chimpanzees are related to the structure of complex sound patterns. Such research could help suggest which precursors to dance were present in the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees around 7 million years ago. Turning from homology to convergence, a key issue is which species can be meaningfully compared to humans in terms of dance. The similarities between human and nonhuman dance are a topic of current interest and debate [21]. Interestingly, dance seems to be far more common in the natural behavior of birds than of mammals [22–24], making avian behavior a rich resource for studies of the convergently evolved features of human and animal dance. The current paper focuses on a group of birds that makes dance-like movements to (...truncated)