Human melody singing by bullfinches (Pyrrhula pyrrula) gives hints about a cognitive note sequence processing

Abstract

We studied human melody perception and production in a songbird in the light of current concepts from the cognitive neuroscience of music. Bullfinches are the species best known for learning melodies from human teachers. The study is based on the historical data of 15 bullfinches, raised by 3 different human tutors and studied later by Jürgen Nicolai (JN) in the period 1967-1975. These hand-raised bullfinches learned human folk melodies (sequences of 20-50 notes) accurately. The tutoring was interactive and variable, starting before fledging and JN continued it later throughout the birds' lives. All 15 bullfinches learned to sing alternately melody modules with JN (alternate singing). We focus on the aspects of note sequencing and timing studying song variability when singing the learned melody alone and the accuracy of listening-singing interactions during alternatively singing with JN by analyzing song recordings of 5 different males. The following results were obtained as follows: (1) Sequencing: The note sequence variability when singing alone suggests that the bullfinches retrieve the note sequence from the memory as different sets of note groups (=modules), as chunks (sensu Miller in Psychol Rev 63:81-87, 1956). (2) Auditory-motor interactions, the coupling of listening and singing the human melody: Alternate singing provides insights into the bird's brain melody processing from listening to the actually whistled part of the human melody by JN to the bird's own accurately singing the consecutive parts. We document how variable and correctly bullfinches and JN alternated in their singing the note sequences. Alternate singing demonstrates that melody-singing bullfinches did not only follow attentively the just whistled note contribution of the human by auditory feedback, but also could synchronously anticipate singing the consecutive part of the learned melody. These data suggest that both listening and singing may depend on a single learned human melody representation (=coupling between perception and production).

Is there a tape recorder in your head? How the brain stores and retrieves musical melodies

“…It is common in a variety of animal species (Patel and Iversen, 2014), especially birds. Some songbird species (such as zebra finches or starlings) learn their melodies from a conspecific teacher, usually their father (Comins and Gentner, 2010; Adret et al, 2012); others (such as parrots or bullfinches) can also imitate words or melodies they hear from humans (Eda-Fujiwara et al, 2012; Nicolai et al, 2014). …”

Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition

“…For example, humans and European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) have similar frequency sensitivity thresholds and auditory filter widths (15)(16)(17), perceive the pitch of the missing fundamental (18), and parse multiple pure-tone sequences (separated in frequency) into separate auditory streams (19,20). At higher levels, the "musical" nature of birdsong has long been appreciated by humans (21), and some songbirds can readily learn to discriminate and imitate human melodic sequences (22)(23)(24).…”

The emergence of verse templates through iterated learning

“…Moreover, this aspect of cognition is not restricted to humans; a number of bird species (e.g. bullfinches, nightingales) learn and reproduce sound sequences, and are shown to engage in chunking too (Nicolai et al 2014).…”