Song Performance Research Articles

Rock sparrow song reflects male age and reproductive success.

The evolution of mating signals is closely linked to sexual selection. Acoustic ornaments are often used as secondary sexual traits that signal the quality of the signaller. Here we show that song performance reflects age and reproductive success in the rock sparrow (Petronia petronia). In an Alpine population in south-east France, we recorded the songs of males and assessed their genetic breeding success by microsatellite analysis. In addition to temporal and spectral song features, we also analysed for the first time whether the sound pressure level of bird song reflects reproductive success. Males with higher breeding success sang at a lower rate and with a higher maximum frequency. We found also that older males gained more extra-pair young and had a higher overall breeding success, although they also differed almost significantly by having a higher loss of paternity in their own nests. Older males could be distinguished from yearlings by singing at lower rate and higher amplitudes. Our findings suggest that song rate may be used as a signal of age and together with song pitch as a signal of reproductive success in this species. Alternatively, younger and less successful males might try to compensate their inferior status by increased song rates and lower pitch. Independent of age and quality, high-amplitude songs correlated with paternity loss in the own nest, suggesting that in this species song amplitude is not an indicator of male quality but high-intensity songs may be rather a response to unfaithful social mates.

Hatching Order and Seasonal Timing of Development Predict Bill Morphology of Nestling and Adult Lincoln’s Sparrows

Traits under strong directional or stabilizing selection can nonetheless vary considerably if the selective forces impinging on them vary in strength or direction. Although such variation is commonly manifested between unrelated individuals, some of the largest differences occur between siblings because of differences in their developmental experience. This is exemplified by the broods of altricial birds, in which asynchronous hatching produces a competitive hierarchy that influences an individual's developmental rate and fitness. Using Lincoln's Sparrow (Melospiza lincolnii), I examined whether the order of hatching or the seasonal timing of development (another factor that influences offspring fitness and estimated as the date of initiation of the clutch from which an individual hatched) predicted variation in bill shape, a trait often under strong natural and sexual selection. I measured individuals as nestlings and as adults for a metric of bill shape (height/width) that is associated with an adult male Lincoln's Sparrow's song performance. I found that an individual's bill shape during the nestling stage positively correlated with its bill shape during the adult stage. Nestling bill shape declined (became wider and flatter in cross-section) with hatching order, and the bill shape of both nestlings and adults declined with the individual's seasonal timing of development. These findings raise the possibility of a trade-off between life stages in the optimization of songbird bill morphology and may explain the persistence of suboptimal bill shapes among adult songbirds in the presence of strong stabilizing or directional selection.

No Correlation Between Three Selected Trade-Offs in Birdsong Performance and Male Quality for a Species With Song Repertoires.

Demanding performance of vocal signals, such as birdsong, may be evaluated by trade-offs among acoustic traits. If individuals differ in their ability to sustain physiologically demanding singing, then aspects of song performance resulting from such trade-offs could signal individual quality. Song performance can also differ among song types, and it is not known whether this influences the assessment of individual quality. We asked whether three trade-off-based measures of song performance indicate male age or aspects of condition (body condition, hematocrit and ectoparasite load) in the dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis), a species with small repertoires. Across a sample of over 100 males, no measure of song performance was related to male age or condition, nor did song performance improve with age for those males recorded in consecutive years. In all cases, the variation in song performance explained by these predictors was small (<4%). Instead, the more song types we recorded from a male, the more likely we were to record high-performance songs, and this sampling effect was stronger than putative correlations with male quality. These results complement a previous study on this population showing that most variation in performance is found among song types rather than among males. Collectively, the lack of association between trade-off-based aspects of song performance and male age or condition, plus variation among song types that interferes with rapid assessment of a male's best performance, indicate that these aspects of song performance do not allow a good assessment of male quality in juncos, and perhaps more generally in species with song repertoires.

Sons learn songs from their social fathers in a cooperatively breeding bird

Song learning is hypothesized to allow social adaptation to a local song neighbourhood. Maintaining social associations is particularly important in cooperative breeders, yet vocal learning in such species has only been assessed in systems where social association was correlated with relatedness. Thus, benefits of vocal learning as a means of maintaining social associations could not be disentangled from benefits of kin recognition. We assessed genetic and cultural contributions to song in a species where social association was not strongly correlated with kinship: the cooperatively breeding, reproductively promiscuous splendid fairy-wren (Malurus splendens). We found that song characters of socially associated father-son pairs were more strongly correlated (and thus songs were more similar) than songs of father-son pairs with a genetic, but no social, association (i.e. cuckolding fathers). Song transmission was, therefore, vertical and cultural, with minimal signatures of kinship. Additionally, song characters were not correlated with several phenotypic indicators of male quality, supporting the idea that there may be a tradeoff between accurate copying of tutors and quality signalling via maximizing song performance, particularly when social and genetic relationships are decoupled. Our results lend support to the hypothesis that song learning facilitates the maintenance of social associations by permitting unrelated individuals to acquire similar signal phenotypes.

Sensory constraints on birdsong syntax: neural responses to swamp sparrow songs with accelerated trill rates

Both sensory and motor mechanisms can constrain behavioral performance. Sensory mechanisms may be especially important for constraining behaviors that depend on experience, such as learned birdsongs. Swamp sparrows learn to sing by imitating the song of a tutor, but sparrows fail to accurately imitate artificial tutor songs with abnormally accelerated trills, instead singing brief and rapid trills interrupted by silent gaps. This "broken syntax" has been proposed to arise from vocal-motor limitations. Here we consider whether sensory limitations exist that could also contribute to broken syntax. We tested this idea by recording auditory-evoked activity of sensorimotor neurons in the swamp sparrow's brain that are known to be important for the learning, performance and perception of song. In freely behaving adult sparrows that sang songs with normal syntax, neurons were detected that exhibited precisely time-locked activity to each repetition of the syllable in a trill when presented at a natural rate. Those cells failed to faithfully follow syllables presented at an accelerated rate, however, and their failure to respond to consecutive syllables increased as a function of trill rate. This "flickering" auditory representation in animals performing normal syntax reveals a central constraint on the sensory processing of rapid trills. Furthermore, because these neurons are implicated in both song learning and perception, and because auditory flickering began to occur at accelerated trill rates previously associated with the emergence of broken song syntax, these sensory constraints may contribute to the emergence of broken syntax.

Is there potential for learning in amusia? A study of the effect of singing intervention in congenital amusia

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical perception and production. Much research has focused on characterizing the deficits within this special population; however, it is also important from both a psychological and educational perspective to determine which aspects of the disorder may be subject to change because this will also constrain theorizing about the nature of the disorder, as well as facilitating possible future remediation programs. In this small-scale study, a professional singing teacher used a broad-brush intervention approach with five individuals diagnosed with congenital amusia. The compensatory elements were designed to enhance vocal efficiency and health, singing technique, musical understanding, pitch perception, and production. Improvements were observed in most individuals in perception, indexed via the Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia scale subtest and in the vocal performance of familiar songs. The workshop setting gave a unique opportunity for observation and discussion to inform further investigations of this disorder.

Managing the "Boss": Epistemic Violence, Resistance, and Negotiations in Milman Parry's and Nikola Vujnović's Pričanja with Salih Ugljanin

Managing the "Boss":Epistemic Violence, Resistance, and Negotiations in Milman Parry's and Nikola Vujnović's Pričanja with Salih Ugljanin Slavica Ranković (bio) Without a doubt, Albert B. Lord's seminal work The Singer of Tales owes much of its success to the series of pričanja ("conversations")1 conducted with the South Slavic singers in 1933-35 by his mentor, Milman Parry, and his native assistant, Nikola Vujnović. This was an endeavor that Lord initially assisted in and benefited from as a student, and a practice he adopted during his own subsequent research trips to Yugoslavia in the 1950s. Along with the hands-on experience of listening to and recording performances of epic songs and other lore, these interviews proved crucial to the forming of the so-called "Oral-Formulaic Theory" inasmuch as they provided vital contextual information, as well as some basic interpretative tools for approaching the sizeable body of recorded epics. Moreover, in the course of the interviews, the singers offered valuable insight not only into what they already knew and did (for instance, how they acquired their skill, how they composed, or what in their opinion counted as a truthful, beautiful, or "correctly" sung tale), but also into what they could know and do, as the interactive and heuristic nature of the interview presented Parry with ample opportunities to test his hypotheses—those that he brought from Harvard and the Sorbonne, and those that were forming and being transformed during the interviews themselves. The ways of thinking that resulted from such probing and experimentation2 must to a significant degree account for the applicability and usefulness of the Parry-Lord method beyond the narrowly South Slavic context.3 As John Miles Foley attests (1998:149): "to date more than 100 language areas have been affected by the approach they initiated." While explored and exploited as a rich resource for learning about oral tradition, the singers' place within it, and attitudes towards it, these conversations are seldom considered as performances in their own right—that is, as meta-performances—that themselves feature the recitation/telling/singing of epic poetry and other traditional lore.4 Although they are likely to be as "genuine" as any other interviews (recorded or not), these conversations bear clear signs of staging. To take those with Salih Ugljanin as an example, just before the "official" conversation begins, the faint whispers of Nikola Vujnović's leisurely, often preparatory chatter with the singer can sometimes be distinguished from the crackling background noise of the phonograph already set in motion. So, too, can some of Parry's barely audible interventions and instructions to Nikola be made out in brief pauses, often marking the turning points of an interview;5 even amidst apparently impassioned debates, charged with ethnic and religious tensions (e. g., PN 659, VI:47-48, R 1053: 0:51-0:52),6 Nikola will not forget to remind the singer, under his breath and fully composed, to voice his contrary opinion glasnije ("louder").7 At other times, the singer himself speaks in a lower voice: when tired or in pain, when insecure, or when he judges the content of his remark as not record-worthy (e. g., PN 654, II:67-68, R 928: 2:19-2:30). In these cases his interviewers rarely follow suit and instead ask him to repeat the remark more loudly, not missing an opportunity, paradoxically, to stage some spontaneity and realism as well. Casting the conversations in terms of useful, primarily supplementary material8 must have obscured, to a significant degree, their performative aspect, as well as rendered all too transparent the otherwise subtle relationships that developed between the collector, the informant, and the routinely neglected third figure that looms large in these recordings, that of the interpreter/mediator. However, one of the more mundane reasons for the conversations' remaining unstudied in their own right must have been the restricted availability of the phonographic recordings to a wider scholarly audience. With the recent establishment of the "Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature On-Line" (MPCOL) hosted by Harvard University, and their ongoing digitization of Parry's and Lord's recordings, it is becoming more and more possible...

Song sharing correlates with social but not extrapair mating success in the white-crowned sparrow

Bird song is a prominent example of a trait under inter- and intrasexual selection. Performance-related aspects of bird song have been shown to vary among males and to influence territorial interactions as well as female mate choice. In oscine songbirds, song is different from many other sexually selected traits in that it is learned. As a result of learning, territorial neighbors share songs in some species. Thus, social interactions may be influenced not only by how well a male performs song but also by whom he shares song with. Here, we test the hypothesis that song sharing indicates local song learning and experience from which females may benefit. We examine the prediction that song sharing correlates with reproductive success. During our 4-year field study on white-crowned sparrows Zonotrichia leucophrys pugetensis, we found that yearling males that shared song with at least one territorial neighbor had higher social mating success than nonsharers. At the same time, song performance did not significantly correlate with social mating success but did correlate with paternity loss. Males with high performance were more likely to lose paternity than males with low performance. No song feature correlated with gaining paternity. We conclude that song sharing may be an indicator of male quality and stable social neighborhoods which may be a direct benefit to females. Furthermore, our results may provide a functional explanation for a developmental process where songbirds adjust their song to the local social neighborhood.

Ideology and the performance of Chineseness

This article examines the construction of Chinese nationalism through song performances on China’s national network, China Central Television (CCTV), with a particular focus on the accommodation of Hong Kong singers. It contributes to the body of knowledge on televised musical performances in Asia, a subject on which there is limited research. I examine two performances by Hong Kong singers on CCTV’s travelling programme The Same Song in 2007, the year China celebrated ten years since the end of British sovereignty over Hong Kong. I argue that singers who are identified as hailing from Hong Kong perform different but overlapping ideological roles for Party-state television. They appear to offer audiences a sense of freshness and modernity, and therefore help the Party-state project an image of open-mindedness and inclusivity. In addition, their songs serve to ease audiences into paying attention to the more overt ideological messages presented through the programme’s dialogue segments.

May Day Is Lei Day in Hawai‘i

Many elementary schools in Hawai‘i host May celebrations showcasing child performances of Hawaiian song and dance or other performance traditions from various ethnic groups that populate the islands. May Day is known as Lei Day in Hawai‘i. Through interviews, observations, and autoethnographic reflections our collaborative research team revealed a range of contrasting views of May Day as a mechanism for arts education, social reproduction, and the perpetuation of culture. We synthesized these multiple perspectives into a performance to create dialogue and submit a call to become more conscious of choices when inscribing culture in children’s bodies. This article includes excerpts of the performance.

Vocal performance varies with habitat quality in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus)

AbstractIn vocal learners, such as songbirds, the ability to maintain an internal acoustic structure between songs during a chorus seems to be positively correlated with the singer’s condition and may, therefore, represent a reliable measure of the singer’s condition. For instance, some internal ratios in the black-capped chickadee ( Poecile atricapillus) fee-beesong are more stable in the song of dominant males than in the song of subordinate males, suggesting that dominant birds are better at maintaining the internal song structure than subordinate males. Habitat quality is also known to affect the behaviour of this species. Birds settling in young forest have a lower song output and lower reproductive success than birds occupying mature forests, and it is suggested that those differences arise from differential food availability across habitats. As recent studies suggest that song performance can be altered by food limitation at the time of song learning, we explore whether habitat quality has a similar effect on the ability to maintain internal song structure as does social rank. We paired males by similar social rank, but who occupied different habitat types, and compared the consistency of male song within his dawn chorus. The ability to maintain an internal song structure of birds occupying young forests was consistently lower than birds occupying mature forests. Our results demonstrate that the same difference that exist in song structure between male differing in social rank also exist between males differing in the habitat in which they sing.

Music, Meaning and Culture

This paper situates musical meaning in culture, addressing music as social symbol and as ongoing process of meaning creation. Three examples of non- Western musical practice are used to illustrate the embedding of musical meaning in cultural context. The performance of an Australian Aboriginal song is shown to exemplify the interdependence of song style and social structure as a matrix for the emergence of cultural meanings; an example of North Indian performance is adduced to demonstrate the multi-layered nature of meaning as embodied in musical performance; and an example of collective festival performance from Nepal illustrates ways in which the structure of musical performance can mirror local cultural forms. Each of the three examples lends weight to the idea that music's meanings are often non-linguistic and reflect foundational schemas that are specific to the cultures from the musics are drawn. Submitted 2012 January 6; accepted 2012 July 13.

Popular Scottish Song Traditions at Home (and Away)

This article addresses the way in which collective ideas of cultural identity in song are appropriated and customised at the local level. More specifically, it examines how the cultural construction of Scottishness in popular song was deployed and mediated in my Scottish/Australian family's song repertoire. [1] It thus considers how song performance served as a vehicle for the formation of family and cultural meaning.

Voice, place and genre in popular song performance1

Earlier sociolinguistic studies have conceptualised popular song as a field of phonological variation where singers do or do not maintain features of their national or regional accents in singing. The present paper explores a wider agenda for the sociolinguistics of popular song, theorised as a diverse field of performance organised according to genre. Following initiatives in the sociology of popular music (particularly Simon Frith's research), voice is interpreted as the repertoire of meaning‐making options available to performers. Voice subsumes dialect indexicality, but also the management of singer identity and singer‐audience relations through the performance of lyrics, rhythmic and bodily modalities. Place is understood as the specific socio‐cultural contexts that are explicitly or implicitly voiced, including contexts of performance and reception. By performing within or against generically structured stylistic norms, performers construct and disseminate different vernacular values and identities. Live tracks from three different, broadly‐defined genres are considered in detail – classic rock and roll (Chuck Berry'sMaybellene), folk/country (James Taylor'sCopperline), and punk rock (the Sex Pistols’Johnny B. Goode).

Song bout length is indicative of spatial learning in European starlings

Female songbirds are attracted to male song, and song may honestly signal male quality. Song is a phenotypic expression of a complex learned behavior and therefore could be indicative of other cognitive abilities. Stressful conditions during early development are known to adversely affect the development of the mammalian and avian brain, and recent evidence suggests a positive association between song quality and learning ability. However, prior studies have not assessed how early-life stress affects both general cognitive functioning and song learning. We subjected nestling- and juvenile-caught European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) to either an ad libitum or food-restricted diet until approximately 90 days of age. As adults, birds’ cognitive abilities were assessed via spatial foraging and social learning tasks, while controlling for the effects of neophobia. Song learning was assessed in undirected and directed singing contexts. We found that birds fed the ad libitum diet had significantly longer song bouts in both singing contexts, made fewer errors in the spatial foraging task, but performed worse on the social learning task than food-restricted birds. Overall, song performance only correlated with performance on the spatial foraging task: Males with longer mean song bouts in the directed singing context committed fewer errors. These data suggest that the neural structures supporting song and spatial abilities are both affected by nutritional stress during development. Female starlings are attracted to longer song bouts and may thus use song bout length to infer spatial learning abilities of potential mates.

Variation within Limits: An Evolutionary Approach to the Structure and Dynamics of the Multiform

Variation within Limits: An Evolutionary Approach to the Structure and Dynamics of the Multiform Michael D. C. Drout (bio) One1 of Albert Lord’s more surprising discoveries about living oral traditions was that no two oral performances of the South Slavic epic that he collected were precisely the same (1953).2 Scholars before Milman Parry and Lord seem to have assumed that any long performance must have been of a text that had been memorized verbatim. It took the Theory of Oral Composition as originally developed by Parry and Lord and elaborated and refined in the decades since3 to explain why in many traditions no two performances are the same at the level of the word and sentence even though the audiences and the performers state that the “same” story is being performed (cf. Foley 2002:12–20). Recent work has shown how the influence of the “performance arena” and the differing skill sets and tendencies of individual singers contribute to the significant variation in the exact words used in any given performance of a specific song (Foley 1995:8–11). But although individual performances vary, they do not vary infinitely, for if they did, there would be no tradition. Oral Theory has used the term “multiform” to describe verbal or textual entities that display this “variation within limits” (Foley 1991:6–8, 1998:149). Although use of “multiform” both as adjective and noun is widespread in scholarship, it remains difficult to find an agreed-upon definition. Lauri Honko’s description of multiforms as “repeatable and artistic expressions of variable length which are constitutive for narration and function as generic markers” (Honko 1998:100–05; cf. Foley 1995:102) is probably as close to a consensus as one can find, but the problem that Lord noted in The Singer of Tales remains: “unlike the oral poet, we are not accustomed to thinking in terms of fluidity. We find it difficult to grasp anything that is multiform. It seems to us necessary to construct an ideal text or seek an original, and we remain dissatisfied with an ever-changing phenomenon” (1960:100). Despite the efforts of many scholars to explain the phenomenon of multiformity (perhaps epitomized by Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem [2002]), it remains difficult to think and talk about the multiform without collapsing it to a single, textual entity.4 Scholars do not even agree completely on the size of multiforms: Parry and Lord’s original approach limited varying formulas to circumstances with identical metrical conditions (although Lord also discussed “themes” that were groupings of ideas [1960:68]), but more recent work has identified much larger multiforms that extend well beyond sentence length (Honko 1998:102–14), and the scholarship seems to be moving in the direction of identifying as multiforms even complete songs (Foley 1998).5 The work of Gregory Nagy in developing an “evolutionary” model has been influential in this area, in particular his view that the multiform should be understood in relative rather than absolute terms, so that any particular composition could be more or less multiform “along a graded continuum” (Nagy 1996Nagy 2001:109–10). That multiforms vary at different levels from the micro to the macro is borne out by studies such as Honko’s of Siri epic or Foley’s work with the variants collected by Parry and Lord (Foley 1998). Nevertheless, significant disagreements among researchers remain, both in theoretical terms and, more specifically, about the relative multiformity—and attendant orality—of particular works (for example, the Homeric Iliad versus the Cypria [Finkelberg 2000; Nagy 2001]). This state of difficulty is not confined to purely oral, or even primarily oral, traditions, either. In medieval studies Paul Zumthor’s discussion of mouvance—most succinctly expressed by Bernard Cerquiglini’s assertion that (1989:111) “l’écriture médiévale ne produit pas de variantes, elle est variance” (“medieval writing does not produce variants, it is variance”)—brought about significant changes in both theoretical approaches and editorial practices (Zumthor 1972Zumthor 1987).6 Although Cerquiglini’s position is seen as extreme in contemporary medieval studies, the variable nature of texts—even when they are not considered to be particularly close to an...

Remapping the Korean Theatre Tradition: A Case Study of Gwolhui, a Theatre of the Confucian Students in the Chosun Dynasty

Traditional theatre scholarship maintains that Chosun-era Korean theatrical forms are rooted deep in the collectivity of the minjung —the economically, socially, and politically deprived—and are essentially minjung theatricalities. While the forms performed and viewed by commoners, such as talchum (mask dance), pansori (epic song performance), geurimja-geuk (shadow drama), and inhyeong-geuk (puppet show), are well researched, theatres of the privileged class or yangban have been obscured and consequently ignored by Korean theatre scholars. Gwolhui (moot royal court play), performed by the Confucian students of the Sungkyunkwan, the national university of the Chosun dynasty, offers evidence of a theatre of the privileged class. Gwolhui shares characteristics found in minjung theatre—collective participation, episodic structure, and bottom-up satire of the society. It is the yangban counterpart to the minjung theatrical forms and, therefore, should be considered part of the Korean theatre tradition.

Singing Women: Lullabies and Carols in Medieval England

Middle English literature frequently depicts women participating in the performance of songs, yet within the surviving corpus of pre-Reformation song lyrics, it is difficult to find evidence of female authorship and even performance traditions.1 Where women’s voices are heard, notably in lullabies and bawdy carols, critics predominantly treat the lyrics as imitations of oral traditions, co-opted within religious or satirical literature, a reading pattern established by Richard Leighton Greene in his influential study of the carol and which continues to dominate more recent analyses.2 Lullabies in particular appear to invite distinctions between authentic and imitative songs because the term is used to describe both songs sung to soothe children and lyrics that depict such songs. References to women who “singe lullinge[s] and oþir cradil songis” to babies can be found within medieval literature, and about twenty Middle English lyrics survive that depict a scene in which a mother lulls her baby or that contain lulling

Absolute Tempo in Multiple Performances of Aboriginal Songs: Analyzing Recordings of Djanba 12 and Djanba 14

songs that are not notated but transmitted through live performance are of particular interest for the psychological study of the stability of tempo across multiple performances. While experimental research points to highly accurate memory for the tempi of well-known recorded music, this study asks whether there is any evidence of absolute tempo in a performance tradition that does not draw on such reference recordings. Fifty-four field recordings of performances of one Aboriginal dance-song, Djanba 14, were analyzed. Results showed that over a span of 34 years, performance tempi deviated positively or negatively, on average, by 2%. Such small tempo variation is similar to JND thresholds to discriminate the tempi of isochronous sequences. Thirty-five field recordings of another song from the same repertory, Djanba 12, deviated in tempi by an average of 3%. We discuss the musical, psychological, physical, and cultural factors likely to shape such temporal stability.

““To Sustain Illusion is All That is Necessary””: The Authenticity of Song Performance in Early American Sound Cinema

In musical shorts, song performances were rendered through a set of stylistic techniques emphasizing performative authenticity and synchronicity. By contrast, the integration of song performances into feature-length films of the same period led to the use of non-synchronous recording practices, such as voice-doubling, for dramatic actors who did not possess musical talent. Newspaper clippings in the Richard Barthelmess scrapbooks (Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library) indicate that film audiences generally accepted voice-doubling as a necessary element of cinematic artifice.