You may scoff at your friend who loves Toto, but chances are they are getting the last laugh. Jeff Porcaro was the drummer in the band and a prolific session player. Porcaro, who died in 1992, appeared on albums by Paul McCartney, Barbra Streisand, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Steely Dan, Pink Floyd and Diana Ross. His drumming style was distinct, and a new study explored why his sound was so popular and pleasing to the ear. It turns out it's all about the fractals.

Fractals are self-similar repeating patterns. If you ever see those trippy patterns of circles and lines or triangles within triangles within triangles, you've seen fractals. These patterns also appear throughout nature. Fractals can be found in Romanesco broccoli, mountains, ferns and clouds, according to Wired.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany, Harvard University and Finland's University of Tampere measured Porcaro's drumming in Michael McDonald's "I Keep Forgettin' " to figure out why we loved the song. It turns out, the drummer was accurate and produced self-similar patterns in his hi-hat cymbal hits. Porcaro varied his hi-hat hits based on rhythm and loudness with extreme precision.

That precision and variety led to self-similar patterns in shorter lengths of time that were repeated in longer time intervals. "Porcaro's patterns can be found on several scales, beginning with two bars and extending to the whole piece," Holger Hening, from the Planck Institute and Harvard, said in a statement.

Fractal patterns also are found in our heartbeat, according to the researchers. The absence of a self-similar repeating pattern was found in deadly heart disease. Future research could further break down Porcaro's technique or look for fractal patterns in the drumming of other pop hits.

"We assume that the fractal patterns in the rhythm and in the loudness fluctuations are universal, meaning that they occur whenever a person holds a rhythm over a longer period of time," Hening said. The research was published in the journal PLOS ONE.