Timbre discrimination in Zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) song syllables.

Cynx, Jeffrey; Williams, Heather; Nottebohm, Fernando

doi:10.1037/0735-7036.104.4.303

Cited by 69 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Females were reported to need more trials than males in learning acoustic discrimination tasks (e.g. Cynx et al 1990;Cynx & Nottebohm 1992), but once they had acquired it they performed any of the subsequent discriminations as well as males did in one study . In another study, females only differed from males in learning to discriminate between two songs from familiar aviary companions, but not to discriminate between two songs of unknown males (Cynx & Nottebohm 1992).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexual equality in zebra finch song preference: evidence for a dissociation between song recognition and production learning

Riebel

Smallegange

Terpstra

et al. 2002

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B

140

119

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Song in oscine birds is a culturally inherited mating signal and sexually dimorphic. From differences in song production learning, sex differences in song recognition learning have been inferred but rarely put to a stringent test. In zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, females never sing and the species has one of the greatest neuroanatomical differences in song-related brain nuclei reported for songbirds. Preference tests with sibling groups for which exposure to song had been identical during the sensitive phase for song learning in males, revealed equally strong influence of the tutor's song (here the father) on males' and females' adult song preferences. Both sexes significantly preferred the father's over unfamiliar song when having free control over exposure to playbacks via an operant task. The sibling comparisons suggest that this preference developed independently of the song's absolute quality: variation between siblings was as great as between nests. The results show that early exposure has an equally strong influence on males' and females' song preferences despite the sexual asymmetry in song production learning. This suggests that the trajectory for song recognition learning is independent of the one for song production learning.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexual equality in zebra finch song preference: evidence for a dissociation between song recognition and production learning

Riebel

Smallegange

Terpstra

et al. 2002

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B

140

119

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Young zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) learn certain aspects of their song's harmonic pattern from their tutor (Cynx and Shapiro, 1986;Cynx et al, 1990;Williams et al, 1989). Both zebra finches and budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) outperform humans in their ability to detect decrements in the amplitude of a single component in a harmonic complex (Lohr and Dooling, 1998).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inflation of the esophagus and vocal tract filtering in ring doves

Riede

Beckers

Blevins

et al. 2004

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Ring doves vocalize with their beaks and nostrils closed, exhaling into inflatable chambers in the head and neck region. The source sound produced at the syrinx contains a fundamental frequency with prominent second and third harmonic overtones, but these harmonics are filtered out of the emitted signal. We show by cineradiography that the upper esophagus, oral and nasal cavities collect the expired air during vocalization and that the inflated esophagus becomes part of the suprasyringeal vocal tract. The level of the second and third harmonics, relative to the fundamental frequency (f 0 ), is reduced in the esophagus and emitted vocalization compared with in the trachea, although these harmonics are still considerably higher in the esophagus than in the emitted signal. When the esophagus is prevented from fully inflating, there is a pronounced increase in the level of higher harmonics in the emitted vocalization. Our data suggest that the trachea and esophagus act in series as acoustically separate compartments attenuating harmonics by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that the trachea behaves as a tube closed at the syringeal end and with a variable, restricted opening at the glottal end that lowers the tracheal first resonance to match the f 0 of the coo. The inflated esophagus may function as a Helmholtz resonator in which the elastic walls form the vibrating mass. Such a resonator could support the f 0 over a range of inflated volumes.

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“…Pitch discrimination thresholds have been shown to be worse in other nonhuman species compared with humans, also potentially a consequence of a smaller cochlear size (Shofner, 2002;Kalluri et al, 2008;Walker et al, 2009). A notable exception to this is in birds; behavioral experiments in birds have demonstrated that they have an exquisite sensitivity to small changes in the temporal fine structure, including phase, of periodic sounds (Cynx et al, 1990;Lohr and Dooling, 1998;Dooling et al, 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Dual-Pitch Processing Mechanisms in Primate Auditory Cortex

2012

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Pitch, our perception of how high or low a sound is on a musical scale, is a fundamental perceptual attribute of sounds and is important for both music and speech. After more than a century of research, the exact mechanisms used by the auditory system to extract pitch are still being debated. Theoretically, pitch can be computed using either spectral or temporal acoustic features of a sound. We have investigated how cues derived from the temporal envelope and spectrum of an acoustic signal are used for pitch extraction in the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus), a vocal primate species, by measuring pitch discrimination behaviorally and examining pitch-selective neuronal responses in auditory cortex. We find that pitch is extracted by marmosets using temporal envelope cues for lower pitch sounds composed of higher-order harmonics, whereas spectral cues are used for higher pitch sounds with lower-order harmonics. Our data support dual-pitch processing mechanisms, originally proposed by psychophysicists based on human studies, whereby pitch is extracted using a combination of temporal envelope and spectral cues.

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Timbre discrimination in Zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) song syllables.

Cited by 69 publications

References 30 publications

Sexual equality in zebra finch song preference: evidence for a dissociation between song recognition and production learning

Sexual equality in zebra finch song preference: evidence for a dissociation between song recognition and production learning

Inflation of the esophagus and vocal tract filtering in ring doves

Dual-Pitch Processing Mechanisms in Primate Auditory Cortex

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