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Monkeys can learn to tap along to a tune, suggesting a sense of rhythm may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than was previously thought.

Until now it was widely believed that the ability to synchronise movements with music is limited to species with complex vocalisations, such as humans and some songbirds.

at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and her colleagues decided to test this skill in macaque monkeys that had previously been trained to tap in time with a metronome.

鈥淥ur question,鈥� says Rajendran, 鈥渨as whether these expert tappers could abstract from their ability to follow the very simple, explicit beats given by a metronome to tap along to a more complex and often subjective musical beat.鈥�

After the initial metronome training, the team trained the macaques to tap along with metronome-like sequences of tones with different tempos, frequencies and volumes.

鈥淥nce they learned to tap along to these acoustically complex sounds, we presented them with real musical excerpts and found that they could tap along much like humans can,鈥� she says.

The songs played to the monkeys included You鈥檙e the First, the Last, My Everything by Barry White, A New England by Billy Bragg and Everybody (Backstreet鈥檚 Back) by Backstreet Boys, the latter chosen because a cockatoo named Snowball became an internet sensation for his dance moves to the song in 2008.

The team ran the same tests with human subjects and found some important differences in how humans and macaques tapped the rhythm.

Tapping to music is unnatural for the monkeys, says Rajendran, and they need a significant amount of training to learn it, while humans do it spontaneously. Also, monkeys don鈥檛 necessarily tap at the same moments as humans would in a given song, and while a person tends to consistently tap one rhythm across trials, a monkey will often tap different interpretations of the beat for the same song.

鈥淗owever, the fact that this skill can be acquired through training has implications for our understanding of the evolutionary origins of human musicality and for our knowledge of the brain structures and connections required to be able to tap along, or dance or sing, to music,鈥� she says.

at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says the study is convincing and it suggests human musical ability is not so unusual. 鈥淭here have to be evolutionary antecedents to matters that require the appropriate brain links,鈥� she says. 鈥淎t least some primates, even when non-vocal learners, have a sense of rhythm.鈥�

Earlier this year, another study based on brain electrical recordings found that , even if they haven鈥檛 listened to music before, but they have little or no sense of melody.