Nature Beats: The What, How and Why of Rhythmic Animal Behaviours

From drumming woodpeckers and chorusing frogs, to dancing birds and synchronized fireflies, the natural world is full of rhythm. But what do these beats and pulses really mean? And what can they tell us about the evolution of music?

This open access book offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of rhythmic behavior across the animal kingdom, bringing together leading researchers in comparative cognition, ethology, evolutionary musicology, neurobiology, and related fields. The volume examines how animals use timing, tempo, and patterned coordination to communicate, compete, and coordinate, revealing rhythmicity as a powerful, yet often overlooked dimension of animal signaling.

Through comparative analysis, the book illuminates how rhythmicity may have evolved, what adaptive roles it plays across taxa, and how studying non-human species can shed light on the prehistoric origins of human musicality. Within this evolutionary perspective, it provides unique insight into how rhythmic behaviors arise from complex interactions among muscular and neural processes, perception, affective states, ecological pressures, and social demands. These intertwined mechanisms reveal the motor and cognitive complexity of rhythmic behaviors and, when considered in functional context, refine our understanding of the communicative and emotional significance of rhythm.

In addition to syntheses of established findings, Nature Beats presents exciting new data from ongoing research, offering readers a glimpse into discoveries as they unfold. Nature Beats will be of particular interest to a broad readership fascinated by animal behavior, music, and dance expression, as well as to researchers in comparative cognition, ethology, evolutionary musicology, biomusicology, and the behavioural and cognitive sciences more broadly. It offers a rigorous yet integrative perspective on rhythmic behaviour, providing new insights into how - and why - rhythm emerges across species.