The Phonological Loop and the Acoustic Adaptation Hypothesis: Orangutan Matches the musical PITCH of a human and he is WAY into it!!

They asked him to match the pitch of vowel sounds made by a scientist.
"Slightly to our surprise, he was matching things perfectly," Shumaker says.

hear it on the vid!

"The type of control that we need to produce vowels and learn vowels is already present in great apes," Lameira says.

In an earlier study, Lameira found that an orangutan named Tilda could make consonant-like sounds, and even produce the rhythms of human speech.

I wonder if Jeffrey Schwartz is citing this - he is author of The Red Ape

 "He's so into it," Lameira says. "He wants to perform so well so badly that we really need to sort of calm him down, and give him hints that he's not being judged according to his performance."

meanwhile

 These results argue that, rather than being a component of domain-general cognition, song learning is an autonomous cognitive module. 

Song learning is likely an autonomous cognitive module in songbirds.

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Birdsong learning can teach us much about the evolution of language learning.

back at the ranch...

 Our results show that great apes spontaneously display primitive conversation rules guided by social bonds. The demonstration that such coordinated vocal interactions are shared between monkeys, apes and humans fills a significant gap in our knowledge of vocal communication within the primate phylogeny and highlights the universal feature of social influence in vocal interactions

 But is it music?

A corpus-based approach investigated rhythmic regularities in children's songs and finds a connection between rhythms in song and non-song speech features (Hannon et al.).

  the activation of an auditory-vocal reciprocal loop, relying on a bidirectional connection between Broca's region with posterior auditory areas via the AF and ventral SLF, enabled the learning of complex vocal utterances by imitation, establishing the basic components of the phonological loop and enhancing auditory-vocal working memory capacity (Petrides, 2014).

  I propose that Australopithecines and early Homo communicated intensely with vocal signals. Darwin already proposed that initially, vocal communication was more similar to music than to speech, which has been updated as the “musical protolanguage,” or prosodic hypothesis (Fitch, 2010; Hickok, 2017). Early humans probably engaged in turn-taking conversations that may have lasted for a long time and served to strengthen bonds, especially between mother and child, but also to communicate emotional states, as seen in marmoset monkeys (Takahashi et al., 2013, 2016).

 On the other hand, the elaboration of auditory-vocal networks and the gradual consolidation of the phonological loop eventually enabled our ancestors to start communicating increasingly complex meanings through the voice (García et al., 2014; Aboitiz, 2017). In later stages, the acquisition of semantics and a primitive lexicon may have been essential for the separation between both kinds of expression, and possibly contributed to the lateralization of these functions, with phonology and speech on the left hemisphere and music/prosody in the right hemisphere, both communicating via the corpus callosum (Sammler et al., 2015).

Ape Chimpanzee Night time acoustic calling
  I also tested whether chimpanzees conform to the acoustic adaptation hypothesis, and produce loud calls during periods of optimal sound transmission.

revealing night‐time activity in an ape otherwise described as diurnal. Chimpanzee loud calls partially, and weakly, conformed to the acoustic adaptation hypothesis and likely responded to social, rather than environmental factors. Call rates accurately reflect grouping patterns and PAM is demonstrated to be an effective means of remotely assessing activity, especially at times and from places that are difficult to access for researchers.

Yep - the Acoustic ancient adaptation to Advanced Alchemy training - it's LATENT!!

 the considerable latent vocal ability that we observe in nonhuman primates is consistent with the hypothesis that a key step towards human speech was the evolution of greater cognitive control of the vocal apparatus (and not the evolution of speech-specific anatomical adaptations).