Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition
| Autor: | Timothy Q. Gentner, Micah R. Bregman, Aniruddh D. Patel |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
pitch processing
Melody Engineering Sound Spectrography comparative cognition Physiological Speech recognition media_common.quotation_subject Pattern Recognition 050105 experimental psychology 03 medical and health sciences Tone (musical instrument) Sequence (music) 0302 clinical medicine Perception otorhinolaryngologic diseases Animals 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Pitch Perception media_common pattern perception Behavior Multidisciplinary Behavior Animal biology Animal business.industry songbirds 05 social sciences Absolute pitch Pattern recognition Biological Sciences biology.organism_classification Songbird absolute pitch Sound Acoustic Stimulation Pattern Recognition Physiological Starlings Pattern recognition (psychology) Artificial intelligence Noise business Timbre psychological phenomena and processes 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol 113, iss 6 |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.1515380113 |
| Popis: | Humans easily recognize "transposed" musical melodies shifted up or down in log frequency. Surprisingly, songbirds seem to lack this capacity, although they can learn to recognize human melodies and use complex acoustic sequences for communication. Decades of research have led to the widespread belief that songbirds, unlike humans, are strongly biased to use absolute pitch (AP) in melody recognition. This work relies almost exclusively on acoustically simple stimuli that may belie sensitivities to more complex spectral features. Here, we investigate melody recognition in a species of songbird, the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris), using tone sequences that vary in both pitch and timbre. We find that small manipulations altering either pitch or timbre independently can drive melody recognition to chance, suggesting that both percepts are poor descriptors of the perceptual cues used by birds for this task. Instead we show that melody recognition can generalize even in the absence of pitch, as long as the spectral shapes of the constituent tones are preserved. These results challenge conventional views regarding the use of pitch cues in nonhuman auditory sequence recognition. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|