An international collaboration of musicians and birdsong scientists discovered that the order of song elements in the Australian pied butcherbird songs studied is strongly related to rhythmical timing.
How are birdsongs composed?
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The discovery was published today in Royal Society Open Science, as per ScienceDaily.
Grammatical syntax and musical rhythm processing have been found to share cognitive resources in the human brain, and this research suggested that songbirds may process syntactic-rhythmic relationships in the same way that humans do.
This study was conducted by Dr. Hollis Taylor, an ARC Fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego.
They discovered that the order of song elements in Australian pied butcherbird songs predicts how the song elements are rhythmically timed, and that this relationship is maintained when the length of song elements is controlled.
This suggested that the interaction of syntax and rhythm in pied butcherbird songs is not an artifact of simply producing song elements of varying lengths in sequence.
"It's very exciting," said Dr. Taylor.
Since 2005, she has been researching pied butcherbird vocalizations in Australia. Each spring, she records their long nocturnal songs from her base in Alice Springs.
This collaboration expands on my previous research into the numerous overlaps between pied butcherbird vocalizations and human music genres.
Each bird sings differently, and the phrases change every year. The songs are interchangeable, like snap-together beads.
These birds have been on the planet for thirteen million years and are minimalist composers.
Previously, studies of song syntax, or how song elements are ordered, dominated songbird research. Song rhythm, on the other hand, has received little attention.
We know that providing a consistent musical beat to children with communication disorders improves their grammatical skills.
To the best of our knowledge, no one has considered how syntax and rhythm might be related in bird songs.
Although more behavioral laboratory research is needed to determine whether songbirds truly process syntactic-rhythmic relationships in the same way that humans do, researchers are getting closer to the conclusion that songbird and human cognition may have more similarities than previously thought, despite the fact that birds lack the layered cerebral neocortex that is thought to support complex cognition in humans.
This study confirmed that music theory can aid in the study of birdsong.
Several recent birdsong papers on song rhythm have been influenced by music theory (and musicality research in general).
The researchers demonstrated the robust potential of collaborations between music scholars and birdsong scientists by demonstrating how rhythmic analyses rooted in music theory interact with traditional syntactic analyses in birdsong sciences.
Most people are familiar with the Pied Butcherbird, which can be found throughout much of mainland Australia, as per Birdlife.
One of the species' most distinguishing characteristics is its beautiful, haunting, flute-like song, which can be heard throughout the day and sometimes well into the moonlit nights.
The song is difficult to forget once heard, and it has been described as "one of the finest in the world."
In addition, pied butcherbirds frequently mimic a wide range of species in their repertoire.
Butcherbirds are all voracious feeders. They eat small reptiles, mammals, frogs, birds, and large insects.
The majority of food is caught on the ground. The birds swoop down on their prey from an exposed perch.
Hunting groups can include several birds from a large group, which could include three or four adults and several young birds, but birds can also hunt alone or in pairs.
The pied butcherbird is a black and white medium-sized bird. It has a completely black hood, a dark brown eye, and a long, hooked grey and black bill.
It has a wide white collar that wraps all the way around its neck and a black bib (throat area).
The rest of the underparts are white, with black legs. The upper body is mostly black, with large white patches on the wings and rump.
The white corners of the otherwise black tail are easily visible in flight. The plumage of both sexes is identical, but the male is slightly larger than the female.
Young Pied Butcherbirds are generally less interesting than adults. The black areas are replaced with brown, and the white areas are washed with buff.
