 Hello, and welcome to the Drum History Podcast. I am joined today by Dr. Edward Large of the University of Connecticut. He's the director of the Music Dynamics Laboratory and a professor of psychological sciences and physics. Ed, how are you? I'm good. How are you, Bart? Good. Good. It's awesome to have you here. I'll preface this by saying I found you, or should I say my wife actually had the idea of finding out how primates use rhythm and percussion, because that's obviously a very primitive form of communication and all that good stuff. We did a little bit of Googling, and you came up, and you mentioned to me that you were not exactly the guy who's just studying bonobos, but you've had some experience in this. Right. So, you know, bonobos have not been observed that much in the wild, in fact. They are known to actually drum spontaneously. They might find a resonant object and drum sort of periodically with their hands and feet. As far as what's that for, you know, I don't think it's really fully understood why they do that in the wild. What we actually did in the study that you mentioned to me earlier when we communicated was we went and worked with a group of bonobos at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens and tried to get them to drum with us. That's amazing. So, expand on that, I mean, and back up a little bit, because you mentioned earlier that there was the talk of the, I believe it was a cockatoo from YouTube. So why don't you give us the whole kind of picture of what's happening here. Okay. So a number of years ago, I think probably more than 10 years ago now, there was a cockatoo that just sort of appeared on YouTube dancing to the Backstreet Boys. A lot of your listeners probably have seen this video. You can still look it up. The cockatoo's name is Snowball. And the owners filmed a video because apparently whenever they would turn on this Backstreet Boys song, Snowball would start dancing to this music. And it was really, it's a really great video for one reason, because Snowball looks like he's having such a good time. It's just amazing. And then shortly after that, one of my colleagues, Adi Patel, who's up at Tufts, actually contacted the owners of Snowball and asked if they would mind if he came out there and did some research. So he did. He and his colleague, John Everson, went out there and they did some recordings to find out if Snowball was actually synchronized to the music. Now you might think, well, you could just see that with your eyes just by watching the YouTube video. But your eyes can be deceiving. They can look like things are synchronized and they're not really synchronized. Your eyes can be a little bit forgiving. So they measured Snowball and they measured, you know, when Snowball's beak would drop down to the low point and they said, you know, is that actually synchronized with the beat of the music? And the answer was super interesting. And it was, yes, Snowball was synchronized, not very well because Snowball would go in and out of synchrony with the music, but was synchronized significantly more than one would expect by chance. So not only was this bird having a great time dancing to the music, but was synchronized at least as well as a human child can synchronize, which was pretty surprising. So the story goes that, you know, Ani and John tried to think of, you know, a hypothesis about why a bird would be able to do this because up until that point, everyone in the field, that we would write introductions to our papers, we would say only humans can do this. Isn't this an interesting behavior because humans do it and animals can't? So they said, well, why can only humans and a cockatoo do this? Around the same time, there was another study that came out of Harvard University where they did a sort of a survey of YouTube videos and looked for keywords about dancing animals. They found a bun, and according to their analysis, which are a little bit more automated, they found that a lot of the animals who are being recorded dancing weren't really synchronizing to the music, but some were, and the ones that were tended to be vocal learning species. So animals that learned their vocalizations over the course of their life, they're not born sort of pre-programmed to make a specific vocalization or a set of vocalizations they actually have to learn. So the hypothesis became that only vocal learning species could do this. It was some sort of an adaptation that involved, you know, preparing the nervous system to learn vocalizations and communicate in this flexible way was found, which was kind of a reasonable hypothesis, but one thing that really surprised me, struck me about it was that chimpanzees and bonobos are not vocal learning species. They don't learn their vocalizations. So it implied that chimpanzees and bonobos couldn't do this. And I just sort of said to myself, you know, I don't believe that. That can't be right. You know, so we found, I was in Florida at the time and we found a cohort of bonobos at the Jacksonville Zilling Gardens and we decided to ask, is that correct or not? You know, is that hypothesis right? So we went up there and we brought a drum. We had it actually specially manufactured for us, especially built to withstand the bonobos because they're tough and they're strong and they bite and they pull and they rip and they explore. We bolted this thing to the floor. We played a little bit for them. They actually, at that first day, we sort of jammed out in the hallway. There were three of us and they all sat there and they watched and they were quiet and they thought, this is the most amazing thing. And when we stopped, they made all kinds of noise and we sort of decided that they were giving us applause and stuff. But a couple of weeks later, we got some photos in our email showing that the bonobos had ripped that drum to shreds. Oh my God. You know, so it was specifically designed and made to withstand that by Remo and they ripped it to shreds. So Remo didn't give up. They went back. They made us another drum. And this one, they weren't able to pull apart. Wow. So anyway, it took us a long time. We were in there for a couple of years and we only had a time to go up there once or twice a month and we didn't want to teach them to synchronize. We wanted to see if they would do it spontaneously. Now, meaning with that, meaning that you would then play a little bit on the drum and just kind of like see if they would join along and play at the same, are you looking for tempo? Are you looking for rhythm? What were you looking for? So there are a lot of different questions that you could ask. You're absolutely right. We, the first question we asked is can they match our tempo? So what we did is I had my graduate student, she went up there every time and she was our drummer. She was our experimenter. She sat out there in the hallway and just played on the drum rhythmically. So she was actually listening to a metronome in the headphones. The bonobo couldn't hear it and it was going through different random tempos and she would play at whatever tempo was prescribed at the moment. And then as soon as the bonobo, whichever one would join in started playing, she would stop and we were just, so we record that bonobo playing by him or herself. Actually, the bonobo who ended up responding the most was a female named Cooney and she was the high ranking females. You might know bonobos, bonobo society is a matriarchy. So the women are in charge. And so she was the highest ranking female having just given birth and they were getting grapes for participating. So she decided the grapes were hers, you know, that's funny. So anyway, so Cooney started participating. And so we would just, so Lexi would sit there in the hallway. She'd bang on the drum when Cooney would start playing, she would stop and then we'd measure the tempo. And what we found, we took it back to the lab, we analyzed it and we found, yes, she's matching our tempo. Now you would listen to the drumming. I mean, sometimes she'd be too fast, sometimes she'd be slow, but on average, she was matching our tempo. She was definitely hearing the difference being fast and slow and trying to match it. Now, would this be for a long period of time? I mean, obviously, it probably wouldn't be 30 minutes of playing exactly to a temp, like a click track or a metronome. But I'm sure, so she'd stay on, she'd stay on for a little bit. And that's kind of how you would gauge it. Mm hmm. Cool. That's right. So she'd stay on it as long as she played. It might be, you know, sometimes she would just hit the drum twice. I mean, now remember, this is not something she naturally would do, like try and drum with a human. So the only reason she was doing it is to get grapes. Okay, okay. So she would, you know, hit the drum twice and then say, give me a grape. And so we would like then start to say, well, wait a minute, twice isn't enough, you know? Yeah. So we did end up in the paper, have a criterion for, she had to hit the drum a certain amount of times before we considered that measurement valid. I don't remember what it was, it was five or seven or something. And so then having established that she was able to match our tempo, we started to ask the real question, can she synchronize? So this is the thing, this is where the hypothesis of vocal learning comes in. Can this Bonobo synchronize with us? So what we did is we had an experiment that was very much the same. Lexi would listen to a metronome, Cooney couldn't hear the metronome. Lexi would start playing with the metronome, Cooney was joining in, but this time when Cooney started playing, Lexi didn't stop. Okay, and her task was try to ignore the Bonobo as much as you can and just, you know, stick with the metronome. Which is easier said than done sometimes when you're playing with guys in a band who can't play to a metronome or something like that. You've had that experience, you've jammed with the Bonobos, haven't you? I feel like I have, yeah. So, right, so, and that's actually was a serious issue with the paper. So, you know, in our world, we write a paper and send it off to other scientists who review it and bring up all the possible problems. And of course, this is one issue, you know, that they have is the human inadvertently synchronizing to the Bonobo rather than vice versa. So, that's really sort of a critical issue here. So, what we did is we measured that in two ways. First of all, we, instead of measuring whether the Bonobo was synchronized to the human tabs, we measured whether the Bonobo was synchronized to the metronome, which she couldn't hear. Yeah. And that's where we were able to convince the reviewers, of course, that she was actually synchronized. And then we did other, you know, analyses of the human to show the human was really well synchronized to the metronome and so forth and so on. So, we were pretty happy with that. And then an interesting thing happened. There was another researcher out at UC Santa Cruz who was working with the sea lion. Sea lion named Ronan, and Ronan had been rescued. I forget actually the reason she was rescued. She was having some problem in the wild. And anyway, she was living in a marine sanctuary in Santa Cruz, not a vocal learning species. And this researcher, Peter Cook, actually trained her to synchronize. So trained her to synchronize to music. And so an interesting pattern started to emerge. So remember that snowball was not that good at synchronizing, but did it spontaneously and look like she was having a great time. Yeah. And that's our original, that's our original cockatoo dancing on YouTube to the Backstreet Boys. OK, gotcha. That's right. Cooney, our bonobo, only did it for grapes. OK. And actually when we analyzed Cooney's synchrony, Cooney was about as well synchronized as the cockatoo, snowball. So their synchronization ability was about on par. One was doing it spontaneously. One was doing it for grapes. One looked like he was having a good time. The other thing about snowball is that we don't actually know if snowball was trained to do this or not because snowball was a rescue. So we don't know what the original owners did. Gotcha. And that would affect it because we're looking for a natural, born, inherent ability to match rhythm and tempo. Yes and no, that's its own question. Let me come back to that. OK, sure. So but with Ronin, Ronin was trained to synchronize to music. Well, trained to synchronize to a metronome. Ronin was only doing it for the fish, kind of like Cooney was only doing it for the grapes. And but when we measured Ronin synchronization, so after the first experiment, I started collaborating with Peter and his crew out at UC Santa Cruz. We actually measured them and compared them to, we actually measured Ronin synchronization at the sea line and compared it to humans. Ronin is as good as a human. Really? Wow. So Ronin, once Ronin starts bobbing her head, she is on it. And we had a very tough experiment that we give to humans where we put a little phase change in there or we put a little tempo change and see how long it takes her to respond just like a human. It was amazing. Wow. Now let me ask you, what was Ronin's, what was her, how was she physically doing this? Like you said bobbing her head. Because I imagine, I mean, head bobbing. OK, because it's different for each animal where there's no hands or there's no this. So she was head bobbing. OK. That's right. Cool. So I started talking with Peter and so forth. And of course, I'm having conversations with Ronnie Patel and John Everson the whole time. And you know, Peter had this sort of different idea. He was like, he said, you know, animals with big brains, they have a choice of what they can do. And they may not have in their natural environment any reason to synchronize like this. But that doesn't mean they can't do it. They have to be, they have to learn to associate some sort of enjoyment or some kind of pleasure with this behavior, which is what we're teaching them by giving them grapes or fish or whatever. Is they're learning a motivation. Yeah, it's similar to humans. You get some sort of physical release from playing music, and you wouldn't do it if you didn't enjoy it, basically. Right. But that's part of the point. With humans, music itself is sufficiently rewarding. Wow. Right. Apparently, with these other big brain animals, it's not. But that doesn't mean that they don't have the capacity. And here, I think, is where the problem comes in with that scientific hypothesis, which says that evolution is building solutions to survival problems. And it was starting to build this vocal learning solution for songbirds, and that's why they could do it. And evolution essentially built a network in the bird's brain for synchrony. And without that evolutionary pressure, other animals won't have developed this kind of a network. And what we're showing with the fact that other big brain animals can do this is that that's really the wrong way to think about evolution. Or that's what we think we're showing. Now, what do you mean by that? Why is that the wrong way? So because it didn't require, apparently, the ability to synchronize doesn't require a network that is sort of specially designed by evolution to do this. Gotcha. This behavior, I would argue, is self-organized. So it's an emergent property of a brain that's sort of big enough to have the flexibility to do something like that. So what's going on in evolution with our big brains is not that it's building specific circuits to solve specific problems that arise over evolutionary time. It's building a brain that's bigger and more flexibly able to self-organize behavior on the fly. Got it. So it can learn as it goes. You might not need that tool until further down in the evolution, but it's there deep down. It's there. And all you have to do is find it and use it. And then the real question about evolution also is is it rewarding? So evolution is, you know, are you being given a reward for engaging in that behavior? That's another kind of an issue. Yeah. And that seems cross species is I'm not going to do something unless I get something out of it. Right. Exactly. Now, let me ask you, too. This is I'm sure that I'm jumping around here, but is it not true that primates use drums as a way of communication? Is that something that is accurate to say? Well, they do. So what they're actually doing it for, I think, is still a method or, sorry, a question of some debate. But it is definitely true that some great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, have all been known to use limbs to do drumming behavior in the wild. So chimpanzees and bonobos will drum with their hands and feet on like a hollow log, some sort of resonant object. Gorillas, you know, you see them beating their chest as part of play behavior. It's not quite clear what the chimpanzees and the bonobos are doing. Some people hypothesize that it might be for long distance communication or something like that. But I don't think that's been well established at this point. Interesting. I think it's pretty cool that it's 2019 and there's so many things that we don't know about what's going on out in nature. It's just a lot of open-ended questions. But OK, so circling back to the original discussion, so with the hypothesis, did you, to wrap that part up, did you actually, was it basically, were you correct in saying that? Did everyone agree that your hypothesis was correct? We're still arguing about it. So we're still arguing about it. And we are actually now trying to get funding to continue our study with the bonobos, with a group of bonobos out in Iowa at the APE cognition and conservation institute there. This is the cohort of bonobos that includes Konzi, who's well known for his linguistic abilities. Really? Yeah. So it's actually nice. It's actually so much better because now we can just say Konzi played the drums for us. And Konzi knows what we're saying and he'll go over and play the drums, if he feels like it. Or if he wants some grapes. Well, that raises the question for me. OK, so you get five human beings in a room. One of them has absolutely no rhythm. One of them is OK. One of them is a natural born, amazing drummer without even a young buddy rich. Then one of them is decent. Are they inherently some of them, would you say, have more rhythm than others, like humans? Well, I think at this point it has been established that, yes, some humans have better rhythm than others. There's a group up in Montreal. Isabel Peretz leads this group. And for her, most of her career, she's been setting a phenomenon called amusia, where there are people who don't perceive music like the rest of us. And a lot of them don't like it either. They try to avoid music because they don't care for it. But that phenomenon that she has mostly studied has got to do with the deficit and the perception of pitch. More recently, she made it sort of a mission to find out if there were people who had similar deficits in rhythm. And she has found a number of them. And she demonstrated experimentally that they really can't synchronize with music. Well, and then so I love where you took that. My original question was more angled towards, is that same deficit found in bonobos? Oh, I see. Interesting question. I mean, I don't know. I guess. Maybe you could say that most bonobos have that deficit, but there are a few genius bonobos, like Buddy Rick or whatever, who just these are the ones who find their way to the drum and start drumming with us. Yeah, bonobo rich. Yeah. I think you have to remember with great apes, right? It's not like you have a rat in the lab where you can sort of force it to participate in a task with a great ape, you sort of have to ask. Yeah, no, I briefly saw it at school here in Cincinnati. I took a class in college and it was actually at the Cincinnati Zoo and my final study was with bonobos and I know very little, it was just basically watch bonobos for about an hour a day. But just fascinating to see how intelligent and I want to say like emotional. They seemed very emotional and smart. Yeah, they absolutely are. I mean, it's hard to like imagine if you don't get a chance to observe them on a regular basis. It's hard to explain what it's like when you are all of a sudden there and you spend hours with them for several days in a row. And especially with Conzie, with that group out in Iowa, looking into Conzie's eyes, it was almost like looking into a human's eyes. Conzie was raised in such an enriched environment with language and all kinds of toys and people and really one-to-one with people all day every day. It was really sort of an incredible experience to meet that particular bonobo. Wow, yeah, and the use of sign language because when we were talking about verbal and nonverbal, it made me think, well, obviously, they're not physically speaking, but they can communicate with obviously, they've been trained with sign language. So there's definitely that form of intelligence, but now are there any other animals? We have bonobos, we had a sea lion, we had a cockatoo, I'm assuming the verbal birds include parrots and things like that. Right, parrots and stuff. Yes, so Irene Pepperburg's parent, who I believe was named Alex, was already quite old when this line of investigation got underway, but she did demonstrate some ability of Alex to do this. So there are slowly, I think, what we're slowly finding is that the more we ask, the more animals we find that are capable of doing this. There was a chimpanzee in Japan, in a research lab in Japan, and they set up, this one was a funny task, so it wasn't, I don't know where they came from, what was their thinking that led them in this direction, but they had a computer keyboard where the keys could light up, and they had one sea light up, and then a sea of above light up, and then the sea of up below, so he was going back and forth between these two keys on the piano. And the task was simply, when that key lights up, touch it, and as soon as you touch it, the next one lights up, and so the task ended up going, it was like a motor coordination task, how sort of fast can you go between these two keys? And then for some reason, they decided to play an auditory tone that was around the same speed at which the chimpanzee was naturally doing this task, and sure enough, the chimpanzee synchronized. Really? Wow. So, you know, so synchrony really, I mean, I think the way to think about it is that synchrony like this is not, the kind of synchrony you find in people playing music is not about a specific circuit per se, it's more of a fundamental phenomenon in biology and in physics, really. I mean, you can see also on YouTube, you can go on the web and see that, if you set metronomes up right on an oscillating platform, you can get metronomes to synchronize with one another. Yeah, I've seen that where you, they slowly start to get crossed over and match. Yeah, wow. This is a general phenomenon in biology. People call it, or biology and physics. People call it synchrony or entrainment. And it can be observed at every time scale in nature from the nucleus of an atom to gravitational synchrony in the cosmos. So it's everywhere, you know. Electrons synchronize in superconductors and that's what allows electricity to flow without resistance in superconducting materials and the biological rhythms, if you think about it, the rhythms of our sleek wake cycles, the biological rhythms of virtually every organism on the planet synchronized to like dark cycles that are caused by the rotation of the earth. So is that what is causing all of this? I was gonna say in layman's terms, what is there a hypothesis on what is causing this things just on earth to start synchronizing? Well, I mean, you could think of it from an evolutionary point of view and obviously it would be adaptive to synchronize, right? If you're awake during the day and you sleep at night, you can see better, okay? Or if you sleep during the day and you're awake at night and you've got good enough eyes, you can eat all the other organisms that are sleeping, right? So it's really definitely adaptive but it also, it's found in all kinds of biological communication. So during mating, you can see bass synchronous flashing of fireflies in tropical areas from the Philippines through Indonesia and Thailand, even Eastern India. So fireflies gather in trees by the thousands and the males flash in rhythmic synchrony. And that happens during mating. Whereas if you look in the brain, synchrony plays a basic role in the communication between neurons within the individual brains. So and neural networks are known to exchange information when they synchronize and they don't exchange information when they're not synchronized. So it's really a foundational phenomenon in physics and biology and it's not as though it happens for any one reason exactly. It's more about communication in general I think and pattern formation. So this is one of the fundamental mechanisms that physicists have found that's responsible for the formation of patterns in the world, right? Interesting and it makes me like again, as a layman, it makes me think of the timing of an engine. If it's a little bit off, it screws everything up or your heart and like a heart palpitation where the rhythm of your heart is off. Yeah, wow. Man, I mean that is just unbelievable and I think that's a good way to kind of bring, to button that up is it's just everything on planet Earth is inherently wants to be, wants to go into that rhythm and naturally it's designed to do that. And you can show that in the brain, the brain rhythms and auditory cortex synchronize to the rhythms of music and speech and if they, if you can somehow suppress that ability and all kinds of experimental ways to do that, people can't understand speech, for example. Wow. So it's very, yeah, it's a very, so it's a universal phenomenon. And to tie it into drum history because obviously I just thought this was a fascinating topic, that just comes back to the beginning of people using rhythm and drumming to go back as early as time, I would imagine. It's just something that kind of ties it all together. And the other thing that I would say about a drumming per se and music in humans is that in humans, behavioral synchronization and rhythmic entrainment that you see in dancing and so forth has been shown to increase cooperation, it leads to increased cooperation and increased feelings of affiliation between individuals. So when you could show this in the lab in a controlled setting, if you synchronize with someone, you like that person better than someone you didn't synchronize with. Why would that be? But it's true. You get along. That's pretty cool. It's true. And as a drummer, think about that feeling you get after a really great band practice. Yeah. And the feeling of you have after a really bad band practice and you hate those people and you never want to see them again. That's right. That's funny. So, well Ed, what else to kind of wrap this up, what are you working on right now? Like what's the next thing you're, besides the rhythmic interactions with non-human primates, what else? So two things really, well, three things. First of all, what we're trying to do is we're trying to show in the brain of adults that synchrony is really responsible for your perception of the beat in music. So synchronization in the brain. So we can create rhythms that we call missing pulse rhythms that are sort of syncopated. And if you look and you say what frequencies are present in that rhythm, you measure it objectively, you see no frequency at a particular, you see no energy at a particular frequency that people tend to hear as the pulse or the basic beat. And if you ask them to tap, that's a frequency they would tap, but it's not in the rhythm. And what we're showing is that you do see this frequency in the brain when they just listen. So that's one thing. And we're trying to understand whether that comes from the motor system. So the next thing is that we're looking in infants and we're trying to understand how infants learn rhythm. So from our previous conversation, you might think that rhythm must be then innate, right? People are born with them. And it's not really true actually, it's surprising. And there are a lot of spurious claims out there in the literature. People say, oh, rhythm is basically innate. Synchronization is super easy. You could see it in young kids. Actually children, if you measure, can't synchronize very well until they're eight or nine years old. And they learn the structure of rhythms and they learn the differences between the rhythms that they hear every day and the rhythm of music from India or the Balkan regions of Europe, which have very different kind of rhythms. So we're showing that, we're showing how that learning process happens. And then the third thing I actually found at a company level, we'll start up out here. And we're building a product called Synchrony LEDs. So this has a little artificial neural network inside. Look it up on the web. It has a little artificial neural network inside. It listens to the music and synchronizes its internal oscillations using the same process that we think the brain uses. And then it synchronizes the light show to any music. So you don't have to pre-program it ahead of time. You just turn on the music. It has a microphone and it synchronizes itself. Cool. So that we're doing just for fun, because it's so cool. Yeah. Well, no, that's like, it's a big thing now to line the inside of acrylic drums with the strips of LEDs. So I think that's actually a perfect use for that, is putting them on the inside of acrylic see-through drums. Yeah, you can go to www.SynchronyLEDs.com to check them out and shop Synchrony. So, man, Ed, that is awesome. That's a surprise that you're doing that kind of stuff. That's really cool. Well, we try and keep the energy flowing. So we like to do good science, but we also like to have good fun and that's good fun. Man, well, I feel very fortunate to have come across you and I want to say thanks to my wife, Abby, for actually discovering you. Thanks, Abby. Thanks for sending in to us. Well, Ed, I really appreciate it, man. This has been great and I think we've all learned a lot about, this is like very, very, very historic drumming kind of stuff where every human, we all have this deep down inside of us. That's right. So it's been fun talking to you, Bart. We'll have a great day, man. I appreciate it. Okay, you too. If you like this podcast, find me on social media at drumhistory and please share, rate, and leave a review. And let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future. Until next time, keep on learning. This is a Gwynn Sound podcast.