ArticleFrontiers in evolutionary neuroscience2012
Birdsong: is it music to their ears?
Article in Frontiers in evolutionary neuroscience, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) can show spontaneous vocal flexibility when exposed to dynamically changing rhythmic sounds.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- The Amygdala Regulates Social Motivation for Selective Vocal Imitation in Zebra Finches.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Do Cockatiels Choose Their Favourite Tunes? Use of Touchscreen for Animal Welfare Enhancement and Insights into Musical Preferences.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Syntactic modulation of rhythm in Australian pied butcherbird song.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Differences in dopamine and opioid receptor ratios in the nucleus accumbens relate to physical contact and undirected song in pair-bonded zebra finches.Behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Birdsong and the Neural Regulation of Positive Emotion.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Immunolabeling Provides Evidence for Subregions in the Songbird Nucleus Accumbens and Suggests a Context-Dependent Role in Song in Male European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris).Brain, behavior and evolution · 2021Article
- Higher-Order Musical Temporal Structure in Bird Song.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Associations Between Environmental Resources and the "Wanting" and "Liking" of Male Song in Female Songbirds.Integrative and comparative biology · 2017Review
- Thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken.Animal cognition · 2017Review
- It takes a seasoned bird to be a good listener: communication between the sexes.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2016Review
- "Bird Song Metronomics": Isochronous Organization of Zebra Finch Song Rhythm.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2016Article
- Genes located in a chromosomal inversion are correlated with territorial song in white-throated sparrows.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2015Article
- Music and the nucleus accumbens.Surgical and radiologic anatomy : SRA · 2015Review
- He hears, she hears: are there sex differences in auditory processing?Developmental neurobiology · 2015Article
- Fos expression in monoaminergic cell groups in response to sociosexual interactions in male and female Japanese quail.Behavioral neuroscience · 2014Article
- Investigation of musicality in birdsong.Hearing research · 2014Review
- Primate drum kit: a system for studying acoustic pattern production by non-human primates using acceleration and strain sensors.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2013Article
- What's in a name? Considerations of homologies and nomenclature for vertebrate social behavior networks.Hormones and behavior · 2013Review
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Since the time of Darwin, biologists have wondered whether birdsong and music may serve similar purposes or have the same evolutionary precursors. Most attempts to compare song with music have focused on the qualities of the sounds themselves, such as melody and rhythm. Song is a signal, however, and as such its meaning is tied inextricably to the response of the receiver. Imaging studies in humans have revealed that hearing music induces neural responses in the mesolimbic reward pathway. In this study, we tested whether the homologous pathway responds in songbirds exposed to conspecific song. We played male song to laboratory-housed white-throated sparrows, and immunolabeled the immediate early gene product Egr-1 in each region of the reward pathway that has a clear or putative homologue in humans. We found that the responses, and how well they mirrored those of humans listening to music, depended on sex and endocrine state. In females with breeding-typical plasma levels of estradiol, all of the regions of the mesolimbic reward pathway that respond to music in humans responded to song. In males, we saw responses in the amygdala but not the nucleus accumbens - similar to the pattern reported in humans listening to unpleasant music. The shared responses in the evolutionarily ancient mesolimbic reward system suggest that birdsong and music engage the same neuroaffective mechanisms in the intended listeners.
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