Jody Serrano
Editor in chiefEditor in Chief at Xataka On. Before joining Webedia, I was a tech reporter at Gizmodo and The Messenger. While I've covered all sorts of things related to technology, I'm specialized in writing about social media, Internet culture, Twitch, and streamers.
For many people, responding when a good song comes on is almost inevitable. Some might move their body in synch with the beat. Others might bob their heads or tap a nearby surface. Those are just the kinds of things a good song makes you do.
But music doesn’t only produce those types of reactions in humans. Animals can respond to music and keep a beat, too. In fact, a new study has found that they might be even better at it than us.
Ronan. For their research, scientists focused on Ronan, a 16-year-old sea lion at the University of California Santa Cruz’s Pinniped Lab. This wasn’t Ronan’s first time participating in a study. She rose to fame in 2013 after researchers published a different study reporting on her ability to bob her head in tune to the beat of different songs, even those she hadn’t heard before.
Ronan particularly shines when it comes to disco music, according to Peter Cook, a behavioral neurologist at UC Santa Cruz and one of the new study’s co-authors. One of her best songs is “Boogie Wonderland.”
“She just nails that one,” Cook said in an interview with the Associated Press.
The university adopted the orphaned sea lion in 2010 after she became repeatedly stranded due to malnutrition. One time, she was found wandering down a highway. After multiple incidents, state regulators decided she could no longer live in the wild.
The study. The new study aimed to address questions that had popped up since Roman rose to stardom all those years ago. For instance, could she still keep a beat? What if her abilities had been a fluke?
Besides tackling doubts, researchers also wanted to study whether Ronan’s abilities had improved over time and, importantly, how she fared when going head-to-head with humans.
To test how Ronan’s abilities, they exposed her to the beat of a percussive metronome at three tempos: 112, 120, and 128 beats per minutes. Notably, the sea lion had not previously been exposed to tempos at 112 and 128 bpm.
Meanwhile, to compare Ronan’s abilities to humans, the researchers asked 10 undergraduates to move their arms up and down to the beat of the metronome, explaining that the movement was chosen because it was the best replica of the way Ronan responded to a beat: by bobbing her head.
The findings. At the end of the day, Ronan boogied her way to the top. Researchers found that she not only improved her beat keeping over the years, managing to adjust her head bobs to music she hadn’t heard before, but also that her abilities were on par or better than those of humans.
“She is incredibly precise, with variability of only about a tenth of an eyeblink from cycle to cycle,” Cook said in a statement. “Sometimes, she might hit the beat five milliseconds early, sometimes she might hit it 10 milliseconds late. But she’s basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again.”
The new study was published in Scientific Reports.
Impact. The new study challenges existing assumptions over which species can perceive and respond to rhythm. It also puts a spotlight on the importance of experience in animals.
“One of the most important outcomes of the study is the fact that maturation and experience matter,” Colleen Reichmuth, another one of the study’s authors, said. “It’s not just a test of rhythmic performance. It reflects her cognitive behavior and her ability to remember and refine it over time.”
Images | Xataka On | Colleen Reichmuth; NOAA/NMFS 23554
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