Abstract
Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements (“notes” or “syllables”) and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed from subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution.
Highlights
Many bird songs show striking behavioral, neural, genetic, and developmental parallels with human language (Doupe and Kuhl, 1999; Bolhuis et al, 2010; Bolhuis, 2013; Lipkind et al, 2013; Jarvis, 2019; Hyland Bruno et al, 2020)
We are not investigating whether all bird songs have high-order musical temporal structure, but whether any bird songs do
Three of 20 species (Field Sparrow, Common Firecrest, and Wilson’s Snipe) had average musicality evaluation responses that were less musical than the null expectation, but none of these were statistically distinguishable from the null
Summary
Many bird songs show striking behavioral, neural, genetic, and developmental parallels with human language (Doupe and Kuhl, 1999; Bolhuis et al, 2010; Bolhuis, 2013; Lipkind et al, 2013; Jarvis, 2019; Hyland Bruno et al, 2020). Since bird songs seem to lack symbolic meaning beyond basic functional reference, they cannot have words, semantics, or syntax in the strict linguistic sense (Marler et al, 1992; Berwick et al, 2011; Bowling and Fitch, 2015). Music varies greatly across cultures in its acoustic features, behavioral context, and conceptual framing, it appears to have remarkable statistically “universal” qualities (Stumpf, 1911; Voss and Clarke, 1975; Nettl, 2005; Savage et al, 2015; Mehr et al, 2019). Analyzing a diverse global ethnographic sample, Mehr et al (2019) found that human vocal songs: (1) showed more variation within than between societies, (2) were reliably associated with behavioral contexts
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