The Song of the Mockingbird

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The Song of the Mockingbird

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In a new study published in May 2021 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, an interdisciplinary team of researchers made an attempt to describe the specific compositional rules behind the song of the northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), focusing on the way the bird transitions from one syllable type to the next.
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/norther ... ce+News%29



Among songbirds, the mockingbird has an extraordinarily variegated song that is much more complex than most species’ songs.

Mockingbirds have enormous repertoires of song elements which are arranged in a particular way: individual syllables, which can be a single sound or a small group of sounds, are repeated to form short phrases, which, in turn, are strung up into long songs that can go on for minutes.

As indicated by their name, mockingbirds are also famous for their ability to mimic.

They will mimic the sounds of birds and other environmental sounds, as long as these sounds are acoustically similar to the typical acoustic feature range of mockingbird vocalizations.

Studies of model selection show, for instance, they mimic blue jay calls but not raven calls, American robin calls but not American robin songs, tree frogs but not bullfrogs.

“When you listen for a while to a mockingbird, you can hear that the bird isn’t just randomly stringing together the melodies it imitates,” said Dr. Tina Roeske, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics.

“Rather, it seems to sequence similar snippets of melody according to consistent rules.”

“In order to examine this hunch scientifically, however, we had to use quantitative analyses to test whether the data actually supported our hypotheses.”

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