Higher-Order Musical Temporal Structure in Bird Song

Frontiers in Psychology

Richard O. Prum¹  Hans T. Bilger²  Emily Vertosick³  Andrew Vickers³  Konrad Kaczmarek⁴ 

[1] Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States;Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States;Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas, Austin, TX, United States;Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, United States;Department of Music, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States;

关键词: bio-musicology;    musicality;    linguistics;    bird song;    sexual selection;    honest signaling;    perceptual bias;    aesthetic evolution;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.629456

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY