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How the Mockbirds compose songs like Beethoven

What he does The complex songs of the robin are related to the song of Beethoven singing the throat of Tuvan Fifth Symphony, song “Show yourself“from Frozen 2, and Kendrick Lamar “Duckworth“? According to recent role published in the journal Limitations in Psychology, the robin follows music rules similar to those used in human music when composing his songs.

“When you listen to a robin for a while, you hear only the random tunes that the bird doesn’t imitate.” said author Tina Roeske, Neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. “Rather, it looks like it will sequence similar melody parts according to consistent rules. However, to scientifically question this doubt, we had to use quantitative analysis to verify whether the data actually supported our hypotheses.”

Moccasins are popular ability to imitate other birds and certain sounds in their environment, if such sounds enter the acoustic range of robins. For example, birds can imitate blue festivals, but not frogs, tree frogs, but not bull frogs. More than half of the robin’s songs are mimetic, and the species has an impressive repertoire of hundreds of types of phrases.

Over the decades there has been a wealth of research on robin songs, with scientists knowing that robins usually repeat each syllable three or five times, separated by a small breath, before changing to something new. (A “syllable” can be a single note or a set of notes.) One 1987 study he has classified thousands of song phrases of four birds, and concluded that although there are hundreds of types of syllables, most are not frequently produced; It appeared only once in 25 percent of the sample data.

What is less understood is what syllables the robins choose to sing, that is, how they compose complex songs. It is not random sampling. This new study is the first attempt to classify or quantify the specific compositional strategies that Mockingbird uses when setting his musical style: the so-called “morphing modes”, in line with variations in a theme. To do this, the group studied the songs of five different robins; three were recorded on the field in mid-spring, and another two were publicly available from the bird song database (Xeno-canto).

The three authors brought a unique perspective to the research, Roeske’s specialty being statistical analysis of animal signals. David Rothernberg is a music philosopher at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who studies the connections between music and nature. And Dave Gammon is a rural biologist at Elon University in North Carolina who has studied the songs of robins (and especially a bird) for many years.

“When you encounter a complex song of muzzles, a musician will hear one thing, an ornithologist another, and a signal analyst something else,” the authors wrote about the reasoning behind this interdisciplinary approach. “The most complete human knowledge of any natural phenomenon comes from combining different human forms of knowledge; no one denies the point of view of others. The strongest are applied together.”

The group created spectrograms of robin songs to help visualize the syllables of the components. They listened to the recordings and made their own qualitative assessments of how the “morphing modes” of the birds work (transitions between sentences). Eventually, they shortened everything to the four basic compositional strategies used by robins as they passed from one sound to another: a change of timbre, a change of tone, a prolongation of the transition, and a narrowing of the transition. They quantified the frequency of the four modes based on sample songs from three of the five birds used in the study and found that approximately half of all morphs were based on timbre.

It’s actually a simplification, and “almost all transitions involve a mix of more than one of these ways,” the authors acknowledge. The four modes are not a rigorous classification system, but a heuristic tool. “We use this as a basis for proving hypotheses,” they wrote, comparing the four modes with the minimum pairs commonly used in phonology (e.g., “house / mouse,” “pull / pool,” and a couple of other words that are distinguished by a single phoneme).


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