The songs of mature zebra finches are notoriously repetitious, or 'crystallized'. Despite this stability, new work reveals that chronic pharmacologically-driven bursting of cortical inputs to the basal ganglia can drive cumulative and lasting changes to multiple vocal features, including phenomena reminiscent of human stuttering."I never had professional therapy, but a couple of nuns taught me to put a cadence to my speaking, and that's why I spent so much time reading poetry -Emerson and Yeats," In this quote from US Joe President Biden, he shares advice on how iterative behavioral practice can largely overcome certain motor disabilities, in his case, childhood stuttering.The basal ganglia are key brain structures for learning complex behaviors including speech; when these circuits malfunction, speech can go awry [1]. Songbirds are useful model organisms to understand brain mechanisms for speech due to significant parallels in how songs and speech are developmentally acquired and actively maintained in maturity [2]. This evolutionary convergence acts at multiple levels, all the way from transcriptional expression profiles in vocal control regions [3] to the functional effects of cooling brain tissue on vocal output [4]. A recent paper by Moorman et al. [5] makes expert use of the zebra finch songbird model to show that the crystallized songs of adult birds can be induced to change and that these changes can persist, likely via transfer to vocal command pathways in the brain. Fortuitously, the brains of zebra finches and related songbirds possess well-defined vocal control circuitry dedicated to learned song. These anatomically tractable regions include a posterior vocal motor control pathway, essential for song production, and an intersecting cortico-basal ganglia loop called the anterior forebrain pathway (AFP), required for vocal plasticity during critical period learning (Figure 1A). The AFP is also crucial for active song maintenance in adulthood. Moreover, the crystallized song of male finches provides a readily quantifiable behavior.Despite the repetitious stability of zebra finch song, work from multiple groups (reviewed by Woolley and Kao [6]) demonstrates that adult finches can acutely adjust their songs when they are experimentally subjected to perturbed auditory feedback. In many experiments, perturbation is made feasible by the fact that there is a slight rendition-to-rendition variation in the fundamental frequency of certain syllables that is actively generated by the premotor cortical AFP region known as the lateral nucleus of the anterior neopallium (LMAN). Reinforcement paradigms can thereby 'punish' birds when the fundamental frequency is outside an experimentally determined value by delivering a blast of white noise. Birds respond by shifting their fundamental frequencies away from this target range, thereby avoiding the aversive stimulus. Perturbed auditory feedback also acutely alters human speech, notably by inducing stuttering (reviewed in Cynx & Von Rad[7]). In both cases, these immediat...