Rhythm in dyadic interactions

Abstract

This review paper discusses rhythmic interactions and distinguishes them from non-rhythmic interactions. We report on communicative behaviours in social and sexual contexts, as found in dyads of humans, non-human primates, non-primate mammals, birds, anurans and insects. We discuss observed instances of rhythm in dyadic interactions, identify knowledge gaps and propose suggestions for future research. We find that most studies on rhythmicity in interactive signals mainly focus on one modality (acoustic or visual) and we suggest more work should be performed on multimodal signals. Although the social functions of interactive rhythms have been fairly well described, developmental research on rhythms used to regulate social interactions is still lacking. Future work should also focus on identifying the exact timing mechanisms involved. Rhythmic signalling behaviours are widespread and critical in regulating social interactions across taxa, but many questions remain unexplored. A multidisciplinary, comparative cross-species approach may help provide answers. This article is part of the theme issue 'Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology'.

Keywords: animal communication; dyadic interaction; multimodality; rhythm; signal timing; synchrony.

Figure 1.

Rhythm and social interactions in indris. (a) A spectrogram of a vocal interaction between two males from the same family group that compete for food; the adult male emits a low-pitched grunt [84] followed by a kiss and a wheeze from the younger male [85]. (c) A spectrogram of part of an unusual solo song by a male indri. (e) A spectrogram of part of a duet by a pair of indris (cohesion song). After dispersing within a territory, they emit a particular song type to regroup in a particular location [86]. Red shading denotes the fundamental frequency of the female's calls, and blue shading denotes the fundamental frequency of the male's units. (b), (d) and (f) are sketches of the animals represented in the adjacent spectrograms.