Keep time to music: also Bonobos stay on beat!

Some animals, like humans, can sense and respond to a musical beat, a finding that has implications for understanding how the skill evolved.
A study of bonobos (Species P. paniscus), closely related to chimpanzees, shows they have an innate ability to match tempo and synchronise a beat with human experimenters. Bonobos are very attuned to sound. They hear above our range of hearing.

For the study, researchers designed a highly resonate, bonobo-friendly drum able to withstand 500 pounds of jumping pressure, chewing, and other ape-like behaviours.
Scientists suspect that the musical and rhythmic abilities of humans evolved to strengthen social bonds, "so, one might think that a common ancestor to humans and the bonobo would have some of these capabilities," said Patricia Gray a biomusic program director at University of North Carolina in Greensboro.

Working with a group of language-competent bonobos at the Great Ape of Trust of Iowa, several whom have recorded with Peter Gabriel and Paul McCartney, and compose melodies using synthesizers, and in collaboration with renowned scientist, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh, the research focuses on both empirical and theoretical inquiries in music cognition and perception, origins of culture, and theory of mind.
Experimenters beat a drum at a tempo favored by bonobos roughly 280 beats per minute, or the cadence that humans speak syllables.
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Microbial Bebop: Creating Music from Complex Dynamics in Microbial Ecology

Taking inspiration from patterns observed in nature and from some of the principles of jazz bebop improvisation, Peter Larsen  and Jack Gilbert, generated Microbial Bebop  (described in this paper), a method by which microbial environmental data are transformed into music. Microbial Bebop uses meter, pitch, duration, and harmony to highlight the relationships between multiple data types in complex biological datasets. They used a comprehensive microbial ecology, time course dataset collected at the L4 marine monitoring station in the Western English Channel as an example of microbial ecological data that can be transformed into music. Four compositions were generated from L4 Station data using Microbial Bebop. Each composition, though deriving from the same dataset, is created to highlight different relationships between environmental conditions and microbial community structure. The approach presented in their work can be applied to a wide variety of complex biological datasets.

For implementation of rectifying melody to harmony, they used the freely available jazz improvisation program ‘ImproVisor’ a free open-source software from Harvey Mudd College Computer Science Department.

Those are the songs:

• Blues for Elle: This composition highlights seasonal patterns in marine physical parameters at the L4 Station. The chords are generated from seasonal changes in photosynthetically active radiation. The melody of each measure is comprised of eight notes, each mapped to a physical environmental parameter, in the following order: temperature, soluble reactive phosphate, nitrate, nitrite, saline, silicate, and chlorophyll A concentrations.
• Bloom: Some marine microbial taxa are most often present in the L4 Station community at very low abundance, but occasionally become highly dominant community members. To link these microbial blooms to relevant physical parameters, the chords in this composition are derived from changes in chlorophyll A concentrations and salinity. The melody for each measure is derived from the relative abundances of typically rare taxa that were observed to occasionally bloom to higher abundance in the following order: Cyanobacteria, Vibrionales, Opitulates, Pseudomondales, Rhizobiales, Bacillales, Oceanospirallales, and Sphingomonadales.
• Far and Wide: Microbial species of the Order Rickettsiales, such as the highly abundant, free-living planktonic species Pelagibacter ubique, are typically, highly abundant taxa in L4 Station data. Its relative abundance in the microbial community at L4 Station follows a distinctive seasonal pattern. In this composition, there are two chords per measure, generated from photosynthetically active radiation measurements and temperature. The melody of each measure is six notes that describe the relative abundance of the Order Rickettsiales  The first note of each measure is from the relative abundance at a time point. The next five notes of a measure follow one of the following patterns: a continuous rise in pitch, a continuous drop in pitch, a rise then drop in pitch, or a drop then rise in pitch. These patterns are matched to the relative abundance of Rickettsiales at the given time point, relative to the previous and subsequent time points. The pattern of notes in a measure is mapped to the relative abundance of Rickettsiales with fewer rests per measure indicating higher abundance. For time points at which Rickettsiales was the most abundant microbial taxa, the corresponding measure is highlighted with a cymbal crash.
• Fifty Degrees North, Four Degrees West: All of the data in this composition derives from twelve observed time points collected at monthly intervals at the L4 Station during 2007. The composition is composed of seven choruses. Each chorus has the same chord progression of 12 measures each in which chords are derived from monthly measures of temperature and chlorophyll A concentrations. The first and last chorus melodies are environmental parameter data as in ‘Blues for Elle’. The melody in each of the second through sixth chorus is generated from the relative abundances of one of the five most common microbial taxa: Rickettsiales  Rhodobacterales, Flavobacteriales, Cyanobacteria, and Pseudomonadales. A different ‘instrument’ is used to represent each microbial taxon. Melodies for microbial taxa were generated as in ‘Far and Wide’.

 
Enjoy the sound of nature!

The Genoma Music Project

Both genetic and musical sequences are ordered structures composed of combinations of a small number of elements, of nucleotides and musical notes. In the case of the genome, the emergence of cellular functions makes the order meaningful; in the case of musical sequences, the consequence of order is the pro- duction of mysterious esthetical effects in the human mind. Can any musical significance be found in DNA sequence? In this work Aurora Sánchez Sousa, Fernando Baquero and Cesar Nombela present the technique used to convert DNA sequences into musical sequences. The musical equivalent of the sequence of a number of genes, either of fungal origin, such as Candida albicans or Sacharomyces cerevisiae, or belonging to the human genome (genes involved in Alzheimer syndrome, blindness, and deafness such as Connexine 26 gene) has been obtained. Non-coding sequences are also important in life and music. The non-coding alphoid sequence has also been translated into a musical sequence, in this case using Fibonacci ́s golden number basic series as structural helper. The elementary musical sequence derived from DNA sequence has served as an imposing frame in which rhythms, sounds, and melodies have been harmonically inserted. The “Genoma Music” Project is essentially a creative metaphor of the basic unity between the human mind and the natural ordered structure of life. (Read the PDF)