A Brief history of avian bioacoustics

Abstract

A proper history of avian bioacoustics would reference early naturalists such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and others who observed that birds not only have acute senses but that they also learn their vocalizations with reference to auditory information and exhibit parallels with human speech, language, and music. On the production side, the development of the tape recorder followed by the sound spectrograph enabled researchers to precisely record, preserve, analyze, and quantify the characteristics of the amplitude and spectral envelope of the acoustic signals which birds use to communicate. In the 1950s Thorpe, and later Marler, tackled the development of vocal learning in birds and the nuances of individual and species differences, which began the modern era of avian bioacoustics. Almost simultaneously, on the perception side, the confluence of Skinnerian conditioning methods, signal detection theory, and the first laboratory minicomputers launched the modern era of animal psychophysics, which continues to this day in helping to understand the striking parallels between avian acoustic communication and speech and language learning in humans.