ArticleBMC biology2014
Assessing vocal performance in complex birdsong: a novel approach.
Article in BMC biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vocal performance in birdsong is an aggressive signal in both females and males: experimental evidence from a field study in European robins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Respiratory contributions to birdsong-evolutionary considerations and open questions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
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- Article
- Skewed performance distributions as evidence of motor constraint in sports and animal displays.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Different frequency control mechanisms and the exploitation of frequency space in passerines.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- The Relevance of Human Whistled Languages for the Analysis and Decoding of Dolphin Communication.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Accelerated redevelopment of vocal skills is preceded by lasting reorganization of the song motor circuitry.eLife · 2019Article
- Shared songs are of lower performance in the dark-eyed junco.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- Multiple song features are related to paternal effort in common nightingales.BMC evolutionary biology · 2015Article
- Studying the silent side of birdsong.BMC biology · 2014Article
- Sequential organization of birdsong: relationships with individual quality and fitness.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundVocal performance refers to the ability to produce vocal signals close to physical limits. Such motor skills can be used by conspecifics to assess a signaller's competitive potential. For example it is difficult for birds to produce repeated syllables both rapidly and with a broad frequency bandwidth. Deviation from an upper-bound regression of frequency bandwidth on trill rate has been widely used to assess vocal performance. This approach is, however, only applicable to simple trilled songs, and even then may be affected by differences in syllable complexity.
resultsUsing skylarks (Alauda arvensis) as a birdsong model with a very complex song structure, we detected another performance trade-off: minimum gap duration between syllables was longer when the frequency ratio between the end of one syllable and the start of the next syllable (inter-syllable frequency shift) was large. This allowed us to apply a novel measure of vocal performance ¿ vocal gap deviation: the deviation from a lower-bound regression of gap duration on inter-syllable frequency shift. We show that skylarks increase vocal performance in an aggressive context suggesting that this trait might serve as a signal for competitive potential.
conclusionsWe suggest using vocal gap deviation in future studies to assess vocal performance in songbird species with complex structure.
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