Animal Song Research Articles

Isochrony as ancestral condition to call and song in a primate.

Animal songs differ from calls in function and structure, and have comparative and translational value, showing similarities to human music. Rhythm in music is often distributed in quantized classes of intervals known as rhythmic categories. These classes have been found in the songs of a few nonhuman species but never in their calls. Are rhythmic categories song-specific, as in human music, or can they transcend the song-call boundary? We analyze the vocal displays of one of the few mammals producing both songs and call sequences: Indri indri. We test whether rhythmic categories (a) are conserved across songs produced in different contexts, (b) exist in call sequences, and (c) differ between songs and call sequences. We show that rhythmic categories occur across vocal displays. Vocalization type and function modulate deployment of categories. We find isochrony (1:1 ratio, like the rhythm of a ticking clock) in all song types, but only advertisement songs show three rhythmic categories (1:1, 1:2, 2:1 ratios). Like songs, some call types are also isochronous. Isochrony is the backbone of most indri vocalizations, unlike human speech, where it is rare. In indri, isochrony underlies both songs and hierarchy-less call sequences and might be ancestral to both.

Fin whale song evolution in the North Atlantic.

Animal songs can change within and between populations as the result of different evolutionary processes. When these processes include cultural transmission, the social learning of information or behaviours from conspecifics, songs can undergo rapid evolutions because cultural novelties can emerge more frequently than genetic mutations. Understanding these song variations over large temporal and spatial scales can provide insights into the patterns, drivers and limits of song evolution that can ultimately inform on the species' capacity to adapt to rapidly changing acoustic environments. Here, we analysed changes in fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) songs recorded over two decades across the central and eastern North Atlantic Ocean. We document a rapid replacement of song INIs (inter-note intervals) over just four singing seasons, that co-occurred with hybrid songs (with both INIs), and a clear geographic gradient in the occurrence of different song INIs during the transition period. We also found gradual changes in INIs and note frequencies over more than a decade with fin whales adopting song changes. These results provide evidence of vocal learning in fin whales and reveal patterns of song evolution that raise questions on the limits of song variation in this species.

Exploring a Toddler’s Foreign Language Development through Watching English Videos on YouTube

This study explores the progress of a Javanese toddler’s Foreign Language (FL) development by providing a stimulus through watching English videos on YouTube. Zhaff, a non-English toddler living in Java was the subject of this study. Longitudinal observation in a case study used as the research method. The data were collected in the form of recorded videos, interviews, and notes taken from direct interaction. This research only focuses on his English and did not give the evidence on his Bahasa Indonesia development. As the results, Zhaff categorized as a bilingual child influenced by the media of YouTube. He experienced an improvement on his FL as the level of the video he watched increased. Starting with a simple vocabulary from animal songs, imitating songs from nursery rhymes, until the improvement in making some phrases and processing complex words that he got from cartoon dialogues. This study further reveals that children’s cognitive ability to acquire vocabulary is marvelous.

The Animal Song by Jonty Howley

The Animal Song by Jonty Howley

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding.

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.

A crescendo in the inner structure of snorts: a reflection of increasing arousal in rock hyrax songs?

Acoustic and rhythmic temporal patterns may have important roles both in animal vocalizations and in human music. Male rock hyraxes, Procavia capensis , advertise their quality and emotional state by singing a long complex song, comprising repetitive elements. Research has revealed that the temporal structure of hyrax songs is similar to a musical crescendo, as it includes a gradual increase in amplitude, along with several additional acoustic and structural parameters, throughout the song. In hyrax songs, the snort is a relatively rare, low and harsh vocal element, which increases in number as the song progresses. We have previously shown that mean snort harshness is positively linked to both the singer's social status and testosterone levels, possibly reflecting inner arousal. Here, we measured the changes in snort harshness and length during natural hyrax songs. Our results indicate that in mature males, harshness, quantified by shimmer and jitter, increases as the song progresses. We suggest that increasing snort harshness may either (1) indicate the progression of inner excitement or aggression throughout the song or (2) that the harshness may reflect the difficulty of vocal control following increasing effort or the physical fatigue of the vocal cords. In western culture music, such progression is used to increase listener tension and thus retain attention, preventing possible habituation. Thus, understanding the development and progression of challenging elements within animal communication systems may reveal a key fundamental root of modern musical structure, and shed light on the evolutionary basis of musical perception. • Acoustic and rhythmic patterns are important in animal vocalizations and in music. • We found that harshness increases as rock hyrax song progresses. • Snort harshness may indicate excitement, aggression or difficulty of vocal control. • Complex elements in animal songs may help explain human music perception.

Difficulties in analysing animal song under formal language theory framework: comparison with metric-based model evaluation.

Difficulties in analysing animal song under formal language theory framework: comparison with metric-based model evaluation.

Superregular grammars do not provide additional explanatory power but allow for a compact analysis of animal song.

A pervasive belief with regard to the differences between human language and animal vocal sequences (song) is that they belong to different classes of computational complexity, with animal song belonging to regular languages, whereas human language is superregular. This argument, however, lacks empirical evidence since superregular analyses of animal song are understudied. The goal of this paper is to perform a superregular analysis of animal song, using data from gibbons as a case study, and demonstrate that a superregular analysis can be effectively used with non-human data. A key finding is that a superregular analysis does not increase explanatory power but rather provides for compact analysis: fewer grammatical rules are necessary once superregularity is allowed. This pattern is analogous to a previous computational analysis of human language, and accordingly, the null hypothesis, that human language and animal song are governed by the same type of grammatical systems, cannot be rejected.

The characteristics of song: An overview for marine mammals

Animal song is often considered to have the following characteristics: (1) produced by males, (2) territorial—related to ownership of an area, (3) stereotyped, (4) seasonally produced, and (5) involved in reproductive displays. The extent to which marine mammals fit these criteria is considered for a variety of species. The occurrence of female song and the lack of clear territoriality are examples that challenge the above model for sexual-selection of singers. Likewise, the factors driving long-term trends in song are not well understood. New perspectives are needed to understand the mechanisms driving marine mammal song.

‘Philosophic Numbers Smooth’: The Ambivalence of Song in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the double currency of song in Keats’s poetry. I read Keats’s presentation of song as a symbol of both transcendent purity and meaningless sensuousness against the eighteenth-century rise of abstract music and speculative histories of the origins of language. Conceptually released from logos, music is considered to be expressive of individual interiority through technique and structure. Traced to involuntary expressions of the emotions, human language finds kinship with (mechanical) animal vocalisation. At the intersections of language and music, song, as a motif, allows Keats to explore how we translate quantitative material into aesthetic experience through the projection of intentionality. Keats plays with the suppression of the anxious quantifying tendencies of the human mind through absorption into pure sensation and intransitive consciousness. Ultimately, however, Keats’s poetics, with animal song as its ideal, frustrates itself with its self-annihilating desire for sensation without meaning.

In Harmony with Nature: The Sheep Episode in Richard Strauss's Don Quixote, op. 35

In Harmony with Nature:The Sheep Episode in Richard Strauss's Don Quixote, op. 35 Jeremiah Trujillo (bio) In Don Quixote, Sancho Panza rides with Don Quixote along a road and encounters clouds of dust (1.18). Don Quixote mistakes the clouds for two approaching armies, and Sancho warns that what appear to be armies actually are herds of sheep approaching. Don Quixote enters into battle against the wooly creatures and kills seven before two shepherds throw stones at him and knock out several of his teeth. In 1897, the German composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) created a symphonic representation of this scene in the second variation of his symphonic poem Don Quixote, op. 35. Among many musical references within the work, Strauss recreates the baaing of the sheep, placing the listener in Don Quixote's position within the scene. The many representations of animals within nineteenth-century musical works merit close examination, both from a theoretical standpoint and for what they show us about contemporaneous views toward animals. The emerging field of nature musicology illuminates our understanding of how animals were viewed in the past. Nature musicology may be defined as the study of how non-human animals and natural landscapes are represented in musical works. Nature musicology scholarship examines how and why human composers represent phenomena associated with the outdoors. This differs from zoomusicology, in which scholars study the musical aspects of sound or communication made by non-human animals. For centuries, composers have used instruments and voices to replicate animal sounds, and historical musicologists have ignored these animal representations, dismissing them as unworthy of attention. In the Journal of the American [End Page 93] Musicological Society, music historian Peter Burkholder dismisses a mass by sixteenth-century composer Johannes Martini that includes the call of the cuckoo: "This last Mass uses borrowed material only in the broadest sense—interspecies borrowing, as it were—and will not be discussed here" (Burkholder 481). Similarly, current Animal Studies scholarship in the humanities neglects music, focusing mainly on literature and iconography. Animal representations are more frequent in late-nineteenth-century musical works than in works of other eras. One reason for their presence is the fact that Romanticism in art music emphasized a program or narrative, and portraying the human relationship with either nature or other powers beyond human control. The sheep episode is particularly apt for questioning how orchestral music represents animals, given the complexities of the sheep vocalizations, Don Quixote's character, and his perceptive delusion. In what follows, I compare music and animal communication, investigating how the sheep episode operates and the contributions of recent scholars. Afterwards, I analyze in detail Strauss's representation of sheep in Don Quixote, op. 35, focusing on how Strauss uses dissonance. Language: The Sonic and the Associations This essay problematizes American ethnologist Peter Marler's claim that both human music and animal songs are primarily nonsymbolic and affective (Jakobson 50). While human instrumental music is non-symbolic, the term "song" as defined in human language may not be appropriate for animal utterances that we do not understand. Marler notes that lexicoding (when signal elements are given meaning) is exclusively human (Marler 31). Many film and literary works imply that through the affective mode of communication, humans can express emotions to animals. For example, Kornél Mundruczó's 2014 film White God asserts the power of affective communication from human to animal. Near the film's ending, the young protagonist Lili sounds her trumpet in a Budapest street and assumes the physical position of an orchestra conductor, as an army of over two hundred canines halt [End Page 94] their advance and lie down before her in the half-circle position of an orchestra. Historically, trumpeters have signaled the onset of military attacks, and in cartoons, a person holding a trumpet often signifies an important news event. Moreover, trumpeters play taps at military funerals, a commemoration of the passing of a sentient being into another state. The scene in White God implies a parallel in the animal world: the canines interpret the trumpet sound as having significance. While we do not know exactly how the dogs interpret the piece of music...

テナガザルの歌は「歌」といえるか？

テナガザルの歌は「歌」といえるか？

Effect of Music Interventions on Sedation in Children Undergoing Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Clinical Trial

Background: Although parenteral sedation is often required in MRI studies in children, it is stressful and increases the cost of healthcare. Objectives: We evaluated the impact of music interventions in children receiving parenteral sedation for MRI studies on total number of doses of sedation medications, sedation time, levels of cortisol and cytokines, sedation success, adverse events, parental satisfaction, and cost savings. Methods: We conducted a prospective open unblinded four-arm clinical evaluation of interventions on 471 children 1-12 years of age undergoing MRI and receiving parenteral sedation. Children were assigned to active music therapy (AMT), facilitated music listening (FML), and as comparison another intervention (child life intervention or CLI), or no intervention (NI); measures included number of doses of sedation medications, time of sedation, sedation success, adverse events, parental satisfaction, and salivary levels of the stress hormone cortisol and pro-inflammatory cytokines, before and after intervention. Results: The total number of sedation doses, total sedation time, and levels of salivary cortisol and cytokines did not differ between the four groups. One FMLA choice, Wee Sing Animal Songs, resulted in significant decrease in total sedation time and reduction of associated costs. Conclusions: The use of one type of FML led to decreased total sedation time in children. This is an important finding since FML is an inexpensive non-invasive intervention which could be of significant time and cost saving benefits.

Principles of structure building in music, language and animal song.

Human language, music and a variety of animal vocalizations constitute ways of sonic communication that exhibit remarkable structural complexity. While the complexities of language and possible parallels in animal communication have been discussed intensively, reflections on the complexity of music and animal song, and their comparisons, are underrepresented. In some ways, music and animal songs are more comparable to each other than to language as propositional semantics cannot be used as indicator of communicative success or wellformedness, and notions of grammaticality are less easily defined. This review brings together accounts of the principles of structure building in music and animal song. It relates them to corresponding models in formal language theory, the extended Chomsky hierarchy (CH), and their probabilistic counterparts. We further discuss common misunderstandings and shortcomings concerning the CH and suggest ways to move beyond. We discuss language, music and animal song in the context of their function and motivation and further integrate problems and issues that are less commonly addressed in the context of language, including continuous event spaces, features of sound and timbre, representation of temporality and interactions of multiple parallel feature streams. We discuss these aspects in the light of recent theoretical, cognitive, neuroscientific and modelling research in the domains of music, language and animal song.

Auditory artificial grammar learning in macaque and marmoset monkeys.

Artificial grammars (AG) are designed to emulate aspects of the structure of language, and AG learning (AGL) paradigms can be used to study the extent of nonhuman animals' structure-learning capabilities. However, different AG structures have been used with nonhuman animals and are difficult to compare across studies and species. We developed a simple quantitative parameter space, which we used to summarize previous nonhuman animal AGL results. This was used to highlight an under-studied AG with a forward-branching structure, designed to model certain aspects of the nondeterministic nature of word transitions in natural language and animal song. We tested whether two monkey species could learn aspects of this auditory AG. After habituating the monkeys to the AG, analysis of video recordings showed that common marmosets (New World monkeys) differentiated between well formed, correct testing sequences and those violating the AG structure based primarily on simple learning strategies. By comparison, Rhesus macaques (Old World monkeys) showed evidence for deeper levels of AGL. A novel eye-tracking approach confirmed this result in the macaques and demonstrated evidence for more complex AGL. This study provides evidence for a previously unknown level of AGL complexity in Old World monkeys that seems less evident in New World monkeys, which are more distant evolutionary relatives to humans. The findings allow for the development of both marmosets and macaques as neurobiological model systems to study different aspects of AGL at the neuronal level.

Analysing differences among animal songs quantitatively by means of the Levenshtein distance measure

The Levenshtein or string edit distance is an objective measure of the difference between two strings of elements. Levenshtein distance analysis has previously been applied to humpback whale songs, where it provided a quantitative measure of song change from year to year. This analysis is extended and a first approach to a robust statistical test is developed. The statistical test addresses the central issue whether two groups of songs (either from different individuals, different groups or different years) belong to the same population of songs or are significantly different. This is accomplished through derivation of the Kohonen median song sequence, which has the smallest possible summed Levenshtein distance to all songs of the group. By a simple t-test or nonparametric equivalent it is tested whether the median distance to the Kohonen median song sequence of a second group is significantly larger, which indicates that the groups are different. The test is expanded to handle multiple comparisons among several groups of songs.

Whale song analyses using bioinformatics sequence analysis approaches

Animal songs are frequently analyzed using discrete hierarchical units, such as units, themes and songs. Because animal songs and bio-sequences may be understood as analogous, bioinformatics analysis tools DNA/protein sequence alignment and alignment-free methods are proposed to quantify the theme similarities of the songs of false killer whales recorded off northeast Taiwan. The eighteen themes with discrete units that were identified in an earlier study [Y. A. Chen, masters thesis, University of Charleston, 2001] were compared quantitatively using several distance metrics. These metrics included the scores calculated using the Smith-Waterman algorithm with the repeated procedure; the standardized Euclidian distance and the angle metrics based on word frequencies. The theme classifications based on different metrics were summarized and compared in dendrograms using cluster analyses. The results agree with earlier classifications derived by human observation qualitatively. These methods further quantify the similarities among themes. These methods could be applied to the analyses of other animal songs on a larger scale. For instance, these techniques could be used to investigate song evolution and cultural transmission quantifying the dissimilarities of humpback whale songs across different seasons, years, populations, and geographic regions. [Work supported by SC Sea Grant, and Ilan County Government, Taiwan.]

Med bioakustiko in glasbo

Med bioakustiko in glasbo

Partitioning of Foraging Space and Nest Sites in a Desert Shrubland Bird Community

Partitioning of foraging space and nesting substrates by birds was examined in a desert community in southern Arizona. The study site was dominated by low shrubs, with scattered thorn trees and stem succulents. Chi-square analysis demonstrated the importance of plant height, growth form, and patch location within the habitat in selection by birds of foraging and nesting substrates and, ultimately, in determination of bird community composition. Phainopeplas, ash-throated flycatchers, verdins, black-tailed gnatcatchers and gila woodpeckers favored thorn trees for feeding substrates, which they subdivided according to height, plant part and habitat patch. Most of these birds, as well as the common ground feeding species (cactus wrens, curve-billed thrashers, black-throated sparrows and Gambel's quail), also used thorn trees and succulents for nesting sites. The presence of thorn trees and stem succulents apparently enhances avian diversity in complex desert shrublands by providing protected nest sites and a structural framework that facilitates subdivision of foraging space. INTRODUCTION Most ecologists agree that vegetation exerts a major influence on the assemblage of breeding birds that occurs within a habitat. In addition to providing the architectural framework within which birds exist, vegetation affects the supply of both plant and animal foods, nest sites and song perches. MacArthur and MacArthur (1961) inspired a wealth of research into bird community structure when they found a predictive linear relationship between vegetation complexity and bird species diversity in forested habitats of the eastern U.S. Scholars subsequently studied bird communities in various temperate and tropical habitats in efforts to substantiate and refine MacArthur's predictive model (e.g, MacArthur et al., 1962; MacArthur et al., 1966; Recher, 1969; Karr, 1971). The arid portions of the southwestern U.S. are well-represented in this body of literature, with studies done by Tomoff (1974) and others (Austin, 1970; Carothers et al., 1974; Stamp, 1978). In keeping with the ecological attitudes of their day, most scholars studying desert bird communities during the 1970s were concerned with communities as units, which they often summarized with diversity indices. Little attention was paid to variation within communities, such as the use of different vegetation components by individual bird species. Indeed, Tomoff (1974) was one of the few students of arid lands of this era who sought underlying functional links between vegetation structure and birds by examining feeding and nesting habits of the community overall. More recently ecologists have probed beneath the superficial community generalizations that were an outgrowth of MacArthur's time to analyze both species interactions and spatial and temporal variation in community composition. Examples include recent studies of desert bird communities by Rosenberg et al. (1982) and Meents et al. (1983). Both studies are in-depth examinations of habitat characteristics and patterns of species occurrence, but, unlike Tomoffs work, do not attempt analysis of nesting patterns. The intent of this study is to examine patterns of vegetation use for feeding and nesting by common species breeding in a desert shrub habitat in southern Arizona. This analysis addresses two questions: (1) What plant cover characteristics separate the common bird species? (2) To what extent does partitioning of nest sites augment subdivision of foraging substrates in the determination of avian community composition in desert habitats?