Solo Songs Research Articles

Testosterone-dependency of male solo song in a duetting songbird — Evidence from females

For male songbirds of the temperate zone there is a tight link between seasonal song behaviour and circulating testosterone levels. Such a relationship does not seem to hold for tropical species where singing can occur year-round and breeding seasons are often extended. White-browed sparrow weavers (Plocepasser mahali) are cooperatively breeding songbirds with a dominant breeding pair and male and female subordinates found in eastern and southern Africa. Each group defends an all-purpose territory year-round. While all group members sing duets and choruses, the most dominant male additionally sings a solo song that comprises a distinct and large syllable repertoire. Previous studies suggested this type of song being associated with reproduction but failed to support a relationship with males' circulating testosterone levels. The present study aimed to investigate the steroid hormone sensitivity of the solo song in more detail. We found that dominant males had significantly higher circulating testosterone levels than subordinates during the early and late breeding seasons. No changes in solo song characteristics were found between both time points. Further, experimental implantation of captive adult females with exogenous testosterone induced solo singing within one week of treatment. Such females produced male-typical song regarding overall structure and syllable composition. Sex differences existed, however, concerning singing activity, repertoire size and temporal organisation of song. These results suggest that solo singing in white-browed sparrow weavers is under the control of gonadal steroid hormones. Moreover, the behaviour is not male-specific but can be activated in females under certain conditions.

Strumming in the void: a new look at the guitar and rhythm in early 17th-century canzonettas

This article provides evidence of a performance practice specific to the strophic canzonetta repertory, one that may supplement previous studies of 17th-century continuo practice. A case is made for the use of standard strummed chord patterns from the five-course guitar repertory to accompany solo song, even when such patterns were not indicated by the notated continuo line. A manuscript from the Cherubini Conservatory in Florence (I-Fc Cherubini cf.108 (antica segnatura b.2556)) integrates strum-pattern guitar notation into the texts of Italian canzonettas. In addition, many of the ‘Cherubini’ songs can also be found in manuscripts lacking the rhythmic notation, as well as in printed sources with basso continuo lines. These concordances show that canzonettas were sometimes adapted to common strumming patterns, even to the extent of altering the notated melodic line. The evidence of the Cherubini manuscript also calls into question the assumption that a lack of explicit rhythmic notation in earlier manuscripts necessarily indicates a rhythmically free performance, and raises the possibility that the recurring periodic rhythmic and harmonic structures typifying later 17th-century practice may have stronger ties to 16th-century unwritten traditions than previously assumed.

Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied (review)

Jurgen Thym, ed. Of and Song*. Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied. Rochester, NY: U of Rochester P, 2010. 450 pp. This collection of sixteen essays by Ann C. Fehn, Rufus Hallmark, Harry E. Seelig, and Jurgen Thym covers a span of forty years, considering that Seelig's Musical 'Spirit' of Goethe's 'Suleika': Settings D. 720 and D. 717 (39-70) began as a lecture-demonstration with soprano Dorothy Ornest at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in May of 1971 . The origin of this chapter is characteristic of the volume as a whole. Regardless of their primary professional affiliation as musicologist, singer, or teacher of German studies, all four contributors developed expertise in interpreting Lieder both as poetry and as song. At professional meetings in the 1970s and 1980s, they shared ideas and frequently collaborated with one another; for example, all four pieces dealing with Poetic and Musical (155-280) were co-authored with the late Ann Clark Fehn, to whose memory Of and Song is dedicated. At the conclusion of his essay on Ruckert Lieder of Robert and Clara Schumann (originally published in 1990 and likewise dedicated to the memory of his recently deceased colleague), Rufus Hallmark provides suggestions for how this cycle of twelve songs from the year 1841 might best be performed today, including the assignment of gender and voice type for the nine solo songs. Hallmark also observes, however: It probably never crossed Robert's or Clara's mind that their Liebesfruhling cycle might receive a complete, formal performance. Concert renditions of excerpted numbers and informal singing of the songs at home was likely all they would have anticipated (359). For the volume at hand, the main question for Jurgen Thym as editor must have resembled that of the Schumanns as they considered the selection and then the arrangement of songs from the 400-odd lyrics contained in Ruckert's Liebesfruhling: which essays by him and his collaborators should he publish, and in which sequence? The solution is genial. Following a hitherto unpublished lecture by Hallmark,On Schubert Reading Poetry: A Primer in the Rhythm of and Music, which anticipates many of the themes of the volume as a whole, readers are presented with five close readings and comparative studies of individual songs, beginning with the aforementioned piece by Seelig and ending with a 2007 publication by the same author entitled 'Hans Adam'- Goethe's Parodistic Creation Myth: A Parody Parodied by Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss. The ensuing co-authored essays on poetic and musical structure examine Text and Music in Settings of Pentameter Poetry (Hallmark/Fehn), Repetition as Structure in the German Lied (Fehn/Thym), Sonnet Structure in the German Lied: Shackles or Spurs? (Fehn/Thym), and Schubert's Strategies in Setting Free Verse (Thym/ Fehn). Part Three of the volume is entitled In Search of Cycles (281-406); here we encounter, alongside the essay on the Schumanns' Ruckert Lieder, four other chapters by each of the volume contributors that deal with Wolf's setting of the Hatem/Suleika Duodrama from Goethe's Diwan (Seelig); text and music in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (Fehn); the Schumann/Eichendorff Liederkreis with and without the inclusion of the poem more familiar from its folksong rendition as Der frohe Wandersmann (Thym); and Schumann's Opus 24 setting of nine poems from the Junge Leiden section of Heine's Buch der Lieder in comparison with the arrangement of twenty poems from Lyrisches Intermezzo that became known as Dichterliebe in their sixteen-poem selection in Opus 48 (Hallmark). …

Baroque references in works of Vlastimir Trajkovic

The article examines Baroque references in three Trajkovic?s compositions: Arion, Le nuove musiche per Chitarra ed Archi op. 8 (1979), Le retour des z?phyres ou ?Zefiro torna? op. 25 (2001) and solo song Renoveau from the cycle Cinq po?mes de St?phane Mallarm? op. 29, in its version for voice, flute and piano (2003), all these compositions being unified by the idea of modernity and novelty, metaphorically contained also in the idea of renewal of nature, which connects music of the moderns from the beginning of the 17th century and Trajkovic?s search for new paths in music, opposite to ?gothic? tangles of the Avant-garde. Complex and multi-layered, the references to the Baroque era in Trajkovic?s works reflect fundamentally generic, arche-textual relations. Compositions Arion and Zefiro torna are set upon explicit references to Italian origins of the Baroque epoch, in theoretical, as well as in the creative domain (to Caccini?s collection of madrigals - Le nuove musiche, 1601, and Monteverdi?s madrigal Zefiro torna, 1614, after Petrarch?s sonnet). Zefiro torna, with a primarily French title and subtitles of the ?scenes? given after antique mythological sources, indicates, again, a twofold generic relation: to the Italian madrigal tradition (including another Monteverdi?s madrigal with the same title composed after Rinuccini?s sonnet, from 1632) and the French tradition of opera/ballet, additionally mediated by references to the opuses of Debussy and Ravel. Multiple literary and musical trans-historical relations can be observed in the solo song Renouveau. However, from these compositions, implicit generic relations, far more than explicit para-textual references, with the whole corpus of themes, forms, texts, discourses as well as crucial poetic concepts of the 17th century music can be inferred.

Male and female Steere's liocichlas respond differently to solo and stereo duet playback

Duets are a form of poorly understood signal created by two individuals temporally coordinating their vocalizations. It has been hypothesized that duetting functions in (1) joint resource defence, (2) avoiding usurpation from a partnership, (3) preventing a partner from being usurped, and (4) signalling commitment to a partner. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we need to determine the intended receiver of the duets and whether duetting is a collaborative act. Steere's liocichla (Timaliidae: Liocichla steerii) is an endemic passerine bird found in the forest edge habitat of mountains in Taiwan. Mated pairs engage in duetting typically initiated by males. We conducted a stereo duet playback experiment, controlled for position effects, to examine the function of duetting in Steere's liocichla. Playback stimuli included conspecific stranger female solo song, stranger male solo song, stranger duet song and neighbour duet song. During the playbacks, males initiated nearly all vocalizations. The propensity for males to sing was not significantly different between the stranger treatments but was lower in neighbour duet playback. However, females responded more to their partner's song, thus creating the duet, after stranger female solo and stranger duet playbacks. Pair members tended to approach the playback source together rather than move separately towards different speakers. When pair members did approach different speakers, however, the birds approached the speaker singing their sex-specific song. Our findings indicate that in addition to joint resource defence, duets in Steere's liocichla also serve a mate-guarding function to avoid being usurped.

Acoustic Monitoring Reveals Congruent Patterns of Territorial Singing Behaviour in Male and Female Tropical Wrens

Many animals defend territories against conspecific individuals using acoustic signals. In birds, male vocalizations are known to play a critical role in territory defence. Territorial acoustic signals in females have been poorly studied, perhaps because female song is uncommon in north-temperate ecosystems. In this study, we compare male vs. female territorial singing behaviour in Neotropical rufous-and-white wrens Thryothorus rufalbus, a species where both sexes produce solo songs and often coordinate their songs in vocal duets. We recorded free-living birds in Costa Rica using an eight-microphone Acoustic Location System capable of passively triangulating the position of animals based on their vocalizations. We recorded 17 pairs of birds for 2–4 consecutive mornings and calculated the territory of each individual as a 95% fixed kernel estimate around their song posts. We compared territories calculated around male vs. female song posts, including separate analyses of solo vs. duet song posts. These spatial analyses of singing behaviour reveal that males and females use similarly sized territories with more than 60% overlap between breeding partners. Territories calculated based on solo vs. duet song posts were of similar size and similar degrees of overlap. Solos and duets were performed at similar distances from the nest for both sexes. Overall, male and female rufous-and-white wrens exhibit very similar spatial territorial singing behaviour, demonstrating congruent patterns of male and female territoriality.

Blowin' in Birdland: Improvisation and the Australian Pied Butcherbird

This paper challenges the assumption that improvisation is a process unique to humans. Despite the general reluctance of biologists to consider birdsong “music,” they routinely comment on improvisation found in the signals of songbirds. The Australian pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) is such a species. Analysis (including transcriptions and sonograms) of solo song, duets and mimicry illustrates their remarkable preoccupation with novelty and variety, and traces improvisation's role in the creation of their complex song culture. The author suggests further zoömusicological case studies for the relevance this research could have to other human (musical) capacities.

Nigel Fortune--A Personal Tribute

Nigel Fortune was a brilliant, cultured, and charismatic man. Possessing a very keen intellect and legendary powers of memory and recall, Nigel was perfectly at ease in the company of fellow academics from different disciplines across the humanities. At the same time he relished the company of people from all walks of life, as shown, for example, by his selfless help for Claire Short (his MP and neighbour) at her local Advice Bureau every Saturday morning. For all that he was seen as a high-powered university don, it was his total commitment to local people and local issues that showed his deep humanity as an individual. To those to whom he was close, Nigel was a loyal friend and an inspiring companion, but at the same time modest and very private. In his professional career he was a formidable scholar and musicologist and will be remembered for his contributions to research in early seventeenth-century Italian solo song, as co-editor and author of the Monteverdi and Beethoven Companions, and for his invaluable work on the editorial staff of the New Grove Dictionary. But, for many of us, he will also be remembered for all he brought to make the Music Department at Birmingham one of the finest in the country. He dedicated his academic career to Birmingham and even under the leadership of Anthony Lewis and Ivor Keys, Nigel was both the rock and anchor of that Department.

"Esprimere la voce humana": Connections between Vocal and Instrumental Music by Italian Composers of the Early Seventeenth Century

Several points of intersection exist between vocal and instrumental music by Italian composers of the early seventeenth century. First, like books of vocal monody with an overt pedagogical purpose, volumes of instrumental music may have been designed to instruct the performer in the conventions of the modern style. Specifically, many books published in the 1610s and '20s offer their users a window on the changeable, fluid idiom of the stile moderno, in which contrast of musical material and a posture of invention assumes primary importance. Second, as in recitative and other vocal styles, much of the vocal and instrumental music of the early seventeenth century is dominated by a metrical flexibility that similarly contributes to an air of immediacy, and that seems designed to highlight the emotional qualities of the music—to convey and move the affetti. And third, whereas the theatrical nature of vocal music of the period—especially music destined for the stage—may appear obvious, some instrumental music of the period may be equally theatrical, containing instructions for interaction with an audience, staging, imitation, and role-play. These points of intersection in particular suggest a relationship between the instrumental stile moderno and the vocal stile rappresentativo, prevalent in operas, ensemble madrigals, and solo songs in the early 1600s. Although no single, exclusive definition of the stile rappresentativo exists, it is nevertheless possible to trace a constellation of features associated with that term through a variety of works. Despite the divergence of the specific musical language of the vocal and instrumental repertoires, some of the vocal features are analogous to elements of instrumental music discussed in the article.

Pastor Iver Brink's Sacred and Secular Music: A Private Collection of Music from Copenhagen at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century

Iver Brink (1665–1728) is familiar to students of Danish religious literature, but a published auction catalogue of his books (1729) shows him also to have been a discerning collector of music. Born in Norway, Brink settled in Copenhagen in 1686. After ordination, he became, in 1691, the first official pastor to the Danish community in London. Returning in 1701, he worked as pastor at two Copenhagen churches. In 1708–9 he accompanied King Frederik IV to Italy as chaplain. Brink's musical collection reflects his religious vocation, his travels to England, Italy and Germany, and especially his fondness for solo song of any description. He penned the texts of several devotional songs, and the ensemble music in his possession hints at his participation in social music-making. The breadth and connoisseurship displayed by his collection reinforces a growing perception that Danish musical culture in the early eighteenth century was less provincial than previously believed.

Singing behavior and singing functions of black‐crested gibbons (Nomascus concolor jingdongensis) at Mt. Wuliang, central Yunnan, China

We used data on loud duetted and solo songs collected from one habituated polygynous group of black-crested gibbons (Nomascus concolor jingdongensis) on Mt. Wuliang, Yunnan, to test several hypotheses about the functions of these songs. The major functions proposed for loud gibbon songs include resource defense, mate defense, pairbonding, group cohesion and mate attraction. Duet bouts are generally initiated by adult males, who select the highest trees near to ridges or on steep slopes as singing trees. Such trees facilitate voice transmission and inter-group communication. Singing trees tended to be located near important food patches and sleeping sites, which supports the resource defense hypothesis. The adult male and two adult females always sang interactively, alternating male phrases with the females' stereotyped great calls, to produce the duets, and females rarely produced great calls if they were more than 30 m from the male. The two females usually produced great calls synchronously during the duet, especially when they were close together. These features support both the mate defense and pairbonding hypotheses. The number of great calls and their degree of synchrony transmit information about spatial relationships and possibly pairbond strength to members to neighboring groups and floating animals. During or after the duet bouts, the adult females and juvenile moved toward to the adult male; and group members maintained a close spatial relationship, which supports the group cohesion hypothesis. Other incidents observed suggest a mate competition role for duets. The adult male always sang when the females started duetting with the subadult male. The subadult male sang solo bouts, but they were not more frequent or longer than bouts initiated by the adult male. Although mate attraction is the likely function of subadult solos, it was not convincingly demonstrated. In conclusion, all hypotheses concerning the function of singing are supported by at least some of the data, and none can be excluded.

Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (review)

Reviewed by: Music in Chopin’s Warsaw Jonathan Kregor Music in Chopin’s Warsaw. By Halina Goldberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. [viii, 330 p. ISBN: 9780195130737. $45.00.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Despite the polonaises and mazurkas, the Krakowiak, and numerous solo songs set in the vernacular, most listeners of Frédéric Chopin’s music would not likely recognize his style as being particularly Polish. His compositions—almost all of them for solo piano—have long been recognized as cornerstones of a Romantic stylistic orientation whose chief practitioners spent most of their time in the artistic metropolises of Leipzig, Vienna, and especially Paris. Indeed, while Chopin was actively involved in Warsaw’s cultural life for more than a decade—composing for the aristocracy, attending university, even working as Sunday organist at a nearby church—most accounts [End Page 781] of his artistic formation begin in earnest with his departure for Vienna in 1829 and especially his move to Paris in 1831. For instance, Tad Szulc’s Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer (New York: Scribner, 1998) glosses over the Warsaw period, and William G. Atwood’s more academic The Parisian Worlds of Frédéric Chopin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) avoids it completely. To be sure, most of the compositions for which Chopin is known today were written in Paris, but the popular and scholarly involvement with Chopin’s career after leaving Warsaw only reinforces our lack of familiarity with the content and context of his early period. Even the ostensibly innocent substitution of “Frédéric” for “Fryderyk” on recordings and concert programs unintentionally alienates modern listeners from the milieu of Chopin’s adolescent years. Halina Goldberg’s Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, therefore, is a welcome publication: a thorough introduction to the political, commercial, intellectual, and artistic worlds of Chopin’s youth; a primer of his early works; and a rich presentation and analysis of documents previously inaccessible to the English reader. For its level of detail about this vibrant community, Goldberg’s volume goes far beyond Iwo and Pamela Załuski’s biographically-driven Chopin’s Poland (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1996). Music in Chopin’s Warsaw is a revision of Goldberg’s dissertation (“Musical Life in Warsaw during Chopin’s Youth, 1810–1830” [Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1997]), and the change of title is revealing. For rather than presenting a musical history of Warsaw between 1810 and 1830, she anchors her discussions of Warsaw’s institutions around the figure of Chopin himself. As such, Goldberg must juggle several stories simultaneously: the sometimes tragic history of the forging of a distinctly Polish identity in the midst of constant foreign occupation, the birth of Polish Romanticism, the relationship between folk, bourgeois, and aristocratic culture, and the rise and fall of Warsaw’s institutions of learning and culture. This structure is largely successful, but at times Chopin’s involvement in these issues is so tangential that his perfunctory inclusion detracts from the flow of her gripping narrative. Central to all eight chapters is Polish nationalism, a topic that regarding Chopin has largely been dealt with inductively through examples from his Paris years, especially the Polonaise-Fantasy, op. 61, and selected ballades and nocturnes. But what efforts were made within Poland to assert a distinctly cultural identity during Chopin’s youth? Goldberg identifies the university (chapter 4, “Musical Education”) and the bourgeois salon (chapter 5, “Salons: Background and Intellectual Trends,” and chapter 6, “Music in Salons”) as particularly important points of convergence between nationalist sentiments and the arts. The salon tradition hearkened back to Poland’s last king, Stanisław August, who “saw [the salon] as a means of encouraging the advancement of learning and arts in his country” (p. 149). Despite—or perhaps because of—Prussian and later Russian occupation of the Polish lands in the first decades of the nineteenth century (the subject of chapter 1, “Historical and Cultural Background”), bourgeois salons exhibited “much more intense political and national atmosphere” (p. 153) than their counterparts to the west. Even a work like Der Freischütz resonated with Polish poets and musicians intent...

Solos, duets and choruses: vocal behaviour of the Rufous-naped Wren (Campylorhynchus rufinucha), a cooperatively breeding neotropical songbird

Vocal communication in duetting and chorusing birds is a growing area of study in avian ecology, yet much remains unknown about temporal and population-level variation in these complex vocal signals. In this study, we describe the acoustic structure and temporal variation in solos, duets, and choruses in the Rufous-naped Wren (Campylorhynchus rufinucha), a cooperatively breeding neotropical passerine. We collected focal recordings of 19 groups to assess both diel and seasonal variation in vocal output, as well as population-wide sharing of vocal signals. We found that birds produce a complex array of vocalisations, including tonal, frequency-modulated syllables grouped into phrases, as well as stereotyped, atonal sounds. Songs are produced as solos or combined into duets and choruses. Solo and duet songs show a dawn chorus effect. Solo song rate, but not duet or chorus rate, varied across breeding stages. The majority of phrases are shared amongst groups, significantly more amongst groups in nearby territories. We suggest that chorus songs may be an important indicator of group identity and may play a role in maintaining group territories, but do not play a role in relation to the breeding cycle. The degree of population-wide phrase-sharing suggests either short-distance dispersal or delayed song learning. This paper is the first fine-scale description of vocal behaviour in this species and enhances our understanding of group-singing in a complex social environment.

The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo: Style in Keyboard Accompaniment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (review)

The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo: Style in Keyboard Accompaniment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. By Guilia Nuti. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xiv, 148 p. ISBN-10 0754605671; ISBN-13 9780754605676. $89.98.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, indexes. This is a useful and attractive guidebook for harpsichordists who are either approaching the accompaniment of Italian vocal and instrumental music for the first time, or for the seasoned continuo player who might enjoy a refreshing tutorial after so many years of working in a personal and reliable style. Nuti has gathered a selection of source materials that will be welcomed by harpsichordists. This book offers an overview of materials that help to inform accompanying and differentiate national styles in performance. Formulating an idea of style in continuo playing is an arduous if interesting process of reading through treatises and as many prefaces as possible, extracting useful information and creating a mental database from which to carve an informed path. While leaving that work to another scholar or performer is not entirely responsible, The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo presents its information in a clear and challenging way, answering some questions and posing many more. In five chapters Nuti sketches a history of continuo playing and charts a chronological road map through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The texts from sources are given in Italian and are all translated. They are accompanied by music examples, most in facsimile. Chapters are divided into intelligent and important topics. We can come to the volume with specific questions and find evidence to help resolve problems. The section on the seventeenth century illuminates the variety of approaches to notation and options for the continuo player while taking part in ensemble works either secular or sacred, instrumental or vocal. The eighteenth century section is quite illuminating about how to play chords, to distribute them between the hands, approach issues of voice leading, and formulating an improvisation style in accompaniment. The volume concludes with a select bibliography of source material and secondary writings. Manuscript sources are given a separate listing and organized according to library locations. I have few complaints about Nuti's volume though some choices might have been made to improve its utility. The bibliography lists all works in alphabetical order. It would have been useful to separate critical sources (such as Charles Burney and Jean Jacques Rousseau) from specific treatises from music publications with important prefaces. In the chapter on seventeenthcentury playing, Nuti brings the existence of written out accompaniments for solo song to our attention. In her section on written out intavolatura accompaniments (p. 33), she focuses on Brussels MS 704 with accompaniments for songs of Peri and Caccini and suggests that these were made for unskilled players and involved the simplest of solutions. …

The uses of lute song: texts, contexts and pretexts for 'historically informed' performance

Because English solo songs from the Golden Age period (c.1600–20) are chiefly familiar from printed books clearly intended for domestic use, modern scholars and performers have tended to assume that composers had the literary interests, practical needs and technical limitations of upper-class amateurs in mind right from the start of the creative process. According to this view, lute ayres are the musical equivalents of early 17th-century miniature portraits: objets d’art for personal contemplation (the self-accompanying singer) or special sharing with special friends. This article explores the lute song repertory from a different angle, as the domesticated tip of a professional and (at the time) a publicly appreciable iceberg much of which melted away with the professional performers originally responsible for its semi-improvisatory effectiveness. The manuscript Oxford, Christ Church Mus.439 is studied in particular—a source with probable professional provenance, preserving some highly ornamented versions of songs now much better known in their plainer printed versions and (at the other extreme) some songs from which the fully written-out lute parts familiar from the printed books have been removed. What sorts of alternative were improvised in their place? While lute song publishers assumed a ‘minimalist aesthetic’ and sensibly encouraged their customers to do the same, lute song composers were aware of other possibilities and those with a theatrical leaning (Campion, Rosseter, Johnson, for instance) might even have preferred them. Today’s historically informed performers have a wider range of interpretative choice legitimately open to them than perhaps they realize.

SEX-ROLE REVERSAL IN SONG? FEMALES SING MORE FREQUENTLY THAN MALES IN THE STREAK-BACKED ORIOLE

Abstract Birds in which both sexes produce complex song are more common in the tropics than in the temperate north, where typically only males sing. Yet surprisingly little is known about female song characteristics in most tropical species. Here we present a comparison of female and male singing behaviors in the Streak-backed Oriole (Icterus pustulatus), a tropical songbird in which both sexes perform solo songs. Females sing much more frequently than males and produce songs with similar acoustic complexity. Rates of singing by both sexes were higher during breeding than postbreeding while the rates of most other vocalizations did not change, suggesting that song plays an important role in breeding. To our knowledge, this is the first reported species in which females regularly sing at higher rates than males; however, few studies have examined female song in other sexually monomorphic or weakly dimorphic species, so such patterns might not be unique.

Repertoire sharing by the individual and the pair: Insights into duet function and development in the plain wren Thryothorus modestus

Although both repertoire sharing and individual variation have been studied widely in male solo song, few studies have investigated these aspects of song in a species that performs complex duets. This study examined song repertoires of both males and females of the plain wren (canebrake subspecies, Thryothorus modestus zeledoni), which performs antiphonal duets, and tested for patterns of repertoire sharing at the level of the individual and of the pair. We suggest that both males and females of the plain wren develop their phrase repertoires by direct imitation from other individuals of their sex, but that males, who may exist for a period as ‘floaters’ after dispersal, learn their songs from a wider pool of tutors than do females. In contrast to considerable individual repertoire sharing, whole duet types were very rarely shared between pairs, despite the potential for this to occur. This suggests that duet types are developed within the pair without reference to other pairs and the implications of this for duet functions are discussed.

VOCAL BEHAVIOR OF THE CRITICALLY ENDANGERED NICEFORO'S WREN (THRYOTHORUS NICEFORI)

Abstract Niceforo's Wren (Thryothorus nicefori) is a critically endangered songbird endemic to dry forests of the Chicamocha Valley in central Colombia. Discovered in 1946 and red-listed by the IUCN since 1988, Niceforo's Wren faces a threat of extinction because of its limited habitat range and increasing deforestation for agriculture and livestock. This species has been poorly studied, and its vocal behavior is yet undescribed. We provide the first description of the vocalizations of Niceforo's Wren, based on analyses of recordings from 29 individuals (more than half of all estimated living individuals of this species). We examined the fine structure of their songs, the pattern of solo and duet singing behavior, and the song repertoire size of males and females. Both sexes produce solo songs, coordinated vocal duets, and a variety of calls. Songs have a stereotyped syntax including one or more introductory syllables, a trill of rapidly repeated syllables, and a frequency-modulated terminal syllable. M...

Duetting in space: a radio-telemetry study of the black-bellied wren

In many birds, individuals 'answer' the songs of their pair-mates to produce vocal 'duets'. One hypothesized function of song answering is that it prevents extra-pair birds from intruding into the duetting pair's territory to obtain copulations or usurp one of the pair-mates. In this capacity, answering may signal that the pair-mates are close together, and so are prepared to defend against such an intrusion. Another functional hypothesis states that answering helps pair-mates maintain contact, and so predicts that a bird is more likely to approach its mate after a duet than after a solo song. I used radio-telemetry to monitor the distance between mated black-bellied wrens (Pheugopedius fasciatoventris). I found that birds of both sexes were more likely to answer their mate's song when the mate was close, and that maximum duet length was negatively related to the distance between pair-mates. Furthermore, song answering positively affected the likelihood of one pair-mate approaching the other after a song. In a significant majority of the approaches after duet songs, the answering bird approached the initiator. I conclude that in the black-bellied wren, (i) the occurrence and duration of vocal duets covary with physical closeness and (ii) contact maintenance is a secondary function of duet participation.

The Duetting Behavior of Pacific Coast Plain Wrens

Abstract Abstract. We provide the first detailed analysis of the vocal behavior of Pacific coast Plain Wrens (Thryothorus modestus modestus). Male Plain Wrens sing two categories of song phrase; one phrase is given as a solo song or duet introduction (I-phrases), while the other is sung primarily during duets (M-phrases). Females sing only one category of song phrase, usually during duets (F-phrases). Both sexes have repertoires of their respective song categories. Plain Wren duets show extreme temporal coordination: duets typically begin with male I-phrases, which are followed by the rapid alternation of female F-phrases and male M-phrases. These patterns are congruent with the solo and duet singing behavior of a sister taxon to the Plain Wren, the Canebrake Wren (Thryothorus modestus zeledoni). Our analyses of Plain Wren songs and duets reveal pronounced differences between males and females and contribute to our understanding of the complex duetting behavior of Thryothorus wrens.