Most people have experienced the disorientation of waking up and not knowing where they are.

So, imagine how it must be to open your eyes in a location that rivals anything conjured in a dream: the inside of the tiny Orion capsule where you are a member of an Artemis crew. Oh, and also, the moon outside is disconcertingly large.

No wonder then that, since the earliest days of space travel, careful thought has had to be given to how Mission Control awakens its crews. It also explains why the default alarm on a smartphone, brutal and devoid of anything pleasant, would probably be a bad idea.

The first known wake-up song played to astronauts was a (Hello Wally, sung by Jack Jones) to the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, in December 1965.

And so a tradition was born. There is now a music played to astronauts spanning decades of the parallel journeys of the space age and modern musical era. Many of the entries are spectacular but cliched songs like Elton John’s Rocket Man, David Bowie’s Space Oddity or Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me.

But some are genuine surprises such as at least two appearances of Hawaiian War Chant, which, in spite of its name, would be surprisingly good to wake up to.

In the months since the world was captivated by Artemis II and its eminently lovable, relatable and inspiringly normal crew, I am still finding myself playing songs from their wake-up playlist, uploaded by .

One is even on high rotation as I walk my dog or do the dishes: In a Daydream by the Freddy Jones Band, which released the song in 1993. The Artemis II crew woke up to it on day three of their mission this year.

“When I wrote ‘In a Daydream,’ I was looking out a window on a rainy day in South Bend, imagining something beautiful,” says band member Marty Lloyd in a note accompanying a newly released of the piece. “Now, decades later, astronauts are listening to the song while looking out their windows at the beauty of space and Earth. It’s surreal how it’s all come full circle.”

I think the reason I enjoy the Artemis II playlist so much is that it says more about the crew as people, than them as astronauts. It was their partners and children, as well as they themselves, who chose the songs, and so classic astronaut hits on previous missions like Gonna Fly Now from the original Rocky and Come Fly With Me do not get a look in.

Instead, we get whimsy and youth and a sense of people who enjoy the same kind of music as us – the kind of regular humans who to work. I think the success of the mission is that the four astronauts made humanity feel like we, too, could be in that capsule.

Artemis II showed not just that we can aspire to great explorations but also that the best human endeavours begin with waking up better.

Musicality may have emerged in a common ancestor of chimps and humans, as both species share similarities in how they drum.

at the University of St Andrews, UK, and her colleagues examined 371 examples of drumming from two of Africa’s four chimpanzee subspecies: the western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) and the eastern chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii).

They use their hands and feet to produce rapid-fire drumming, often on buttress roots and mainly when resting, while travelling or during threat displays.

Hobaiter says that while chimpanzees drum regularly, rainforests are really difficult places to carry out studies and for some of the populations, it has taken decades to collect the data.

Eventually, the researchers found that chimps drum much faster than most humans. “The longest drum we recorded was over 5 seconds, while the shortest was less than 0.1 seconds,” says Hobaiter. “But chimpanzees will also repeat these drumming bouts several times, especially when they’re travelling.”

Despite the differences between chimpanzee and human drumming, chimps show some of the “core building blocks of human musical rhythm”, says team member at the University of Vienna, Austria.

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“They drum with rhythm, as opposed to randomly, and they use a typical rhythm observed across musical cultures called isochrony, consisting of hits that are regularly spaced, like the ticking of a clock,” she says. “We also found that the two eastern and western chimpanzee subspecies living on the opposite sides of Africa drum with different rhythms.”

She says eastern chimpanzees alternate short and long spaces between their drumming hits, while western chimpanzees evenly space them. These chimps also drum faster, use more hits and start drumming earlier in their distinctive pant-hoot calls.

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at the University of Girona in Spain says the idea that different subspecies show distinct drumming styles is fascinating. “It opens the door to thinking about these patterns not just as individual quirks, but potentially as cultural differences in how groups use drumming as a communicative tool.”

We already know that rhythm is fundamental to human social behaviour – whether in music and dance or in the back and forth of a conversation, says Hobaiter. “We don’t mean that chimpanzee drumming shows the sophistication of modern human musical rhythms. But this is the first time that we’ve been able to show that they share the same rhythmic building blocks, making it likely that rhythm was a part of our social world long before we became human.”

“Until recently, it was argued that rhythmicity was unique to humans,” says at the University of New England, Australia. “We now have plenty evidence that this is not the case.”