What makes the Australian pied butcherbird's song so beautiful?

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-09-28 09:01

Australia; International; NSW

Pied_Butcherbird,_Springbrook_National_Park,_Queensland_-_Australia,_April_21_2014_(14610454463) By Andrew Thomas from Shrewsbury, UK - CC BY-SA 2.0

The song of the Australian pied butcherbird is beautiful and complex, so US and Australian scientists set out to investigate its features, finding that syntax and rhythm play important roles. Looking at these two features together, they say organised syntax and diverse rhythms make the song sounds as it does, and the rhythms can be predicted by the initial syntax of the song. They also noted that the silent intervals between notes impose rhythmic structure on the bird's song.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Syntactic modulation of rhythm in Australian pied butcherbird song

Birdsong is temporally complex, but investigations of birdsong often only examine singular features of this complexity in isolation. We analyzed Australian pied butcherbird songs, which are musically sonorous and incredibly complex, and found two features of temporal complexity (sequential syntax and rhythm) that have meaningful predictive relationships with each other. We propose that birdsong complexity may best be considered as an interactive and emergent property of the songbird communication system, and advocate for studying the relationships between song features beyond the features themselves.

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Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The University of Sydney, University of California San Diego, USA

Funder: Portions of this work were supported by an HDSI Undergraduate Scholarship to J.X., a UC Scholars Scholarship to J.X., a CARTA Fellowship to T.S., NIH 5T32MH020002-20 to T.S., an ARC Future Fellowship FT190100605 to H.T., and NIH 5R01DC018055-02 to T.G.

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