The findings – outlined in two studies – show for the first time that a very basic aspect of the human response to a beat is shared with other species, according to the researchers.
"We've discovered a cockatoo named Snowball that dances to the beat of human music," said Dr Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, lead author of one of the studies.
"Using a controlled experiment, we've shown that if the music speeds up or slows down across a wide range, he adjusts the tempo of his dancing to stay synchronised to the beat."
One of Snowball's favourite dancing tunes is none other than the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody", he added.
"For a long time, people have thought that the ability to move to a beat was unique to humans," said Adena Schachner of Harvard University, who led the other study.
"After all, there is no convincing evidence that our closest relatives, chimpanzees and other apes, can keep a beat, and there is similarly no evidence that our pet dogs and cats can line up their actions with a musical beat, in spite of extensive experience with humans.
In this work, however, we found that entrainment [to music] is not uniquely human; we find strong evidence for it in birds, specifically in parrots."
Before this discovery, scientists who studied music and the brain thought that moving to a musical beat might be a uniquely human ability because we don't commonly see other animals moving rhythmically to music, Dr Patel said.
In fact, as far as they know, birds in the wild do not move in time with sounds, leaving many scientists to think that this ability might be an evolutionary specialisation of the human brain for music cognition.
But that may not be so, the new studies suggest.
They now suspect that the parrots' ability can be traced to another capacity they share with people: vocal learning or mimicry.
Miss Schachner's group searched YouTube for videos of dancing animals.
Of more than 1,000 videos that turned up, only those of vocal mimics – representing 14 parrot species and one species of elephant – showed evidence that they could really get into the groove.
"A natural question about these results is whether they generalise to other parrots, or more broadly, to other vocal-learning species," the study said.
the telegraph
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 7:00AM BST 01 May 2009
