A fantastic YouTube video has been making the rounds. It’s a cockatoo named Snowball dancing to The Backstreet Boys. It’s all kinds of awesome, but it’s also one of, if not the first, totally conclusive demonstration of an animal enthusiastically entraining its movements to rhythmic sound. Here’s the bird:
Aniruddh Patel got on the case, did some experiments and wrote a paper on the cockatoo. He concludes that, while it’s confined to a relatively small range of tempos and isn’t particularly reliable, the dancing bird is basically for real. The paper is a great read. Its final sentence is oddly touching:
It will be interesting to determine whether the range of tempi to which Snowball can synchronize is expanded when dancing with a partner.
Here’s the paper:
- Patel, A.D., Iversen, J.R., Bregman, M.B., Schulz, I., & Schulz, C. (in press). Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC10), August 2008, Sapporo, Japan. M. Adachi et al. (Eds.), Adelaide: Causal Productions.
More videos on Patel’s publications page.