Higher-Order Musical Temporal Structure in Bird Song

Autor: Hans T. Bilger, Emily Vertosick, Andrew Vickers, Konrad Kaczmarek, Richard O. Prum
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 12 (2021)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1664-1078
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.629456
Popis: Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements (“notes” or “syllables”) and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed from subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals