Chiara De Gregorio (Flag #2) focuses on primate communication, primarily among singing primates, with the goal of understanding the social and environmental factors that shape singing behavior, and how these vocalizations relate to the evolution of human language and music. Her recent paper on categorical rhythms in a singing primate, for which she won the SIE Young Ethologist Prize for best paper, finds that a lemur species’ coordinated songs are remarkably similar to human music, suggesting that musical rhythm may be much older than we thought. Carrying recording equipment, camera traps and GPS, she is used to conducting fieldwork in remote places with basic accommodations – gelada baboons in Ethiopia, yellow baboons in Malawi, and these wild “Indri” lemurs in the montane rainforests of Madagascar, for instance.

This expedition took her to the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, where she managed a project to understand the remote population of titi monkeys (Plecturocebus cupreus), one of the four primate genera that communicate using songs that, as our own music, are composed of notes that are organized in phrases. Using microphones and recorders to collect their incredible duets and choruses, Chiara and her team analyzed these songs to search for musical universals, as rhythmic categories, metrical hierarchy, descending contours and others. This research may indicate that human music is not truly novel; its intrinsic musical properties are more deeply rooted in the Primate lineage than previously thought, adding a new piece of evidence to the biological roots of our love for music.