ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Principles of structure building in music, language and animal song.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Challenges and new opportunities in deciphering the meaning of corvid call sequences.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Leopard seal song patterns have similar predictability to nursery rhymes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Call combination production is linked to the social environment in Western Australian magpies (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Spectrotemporal cues and attention jointly modulate fMRI network topology for sentence and melody perception.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Multi-level combinatoriality in magpie non-song vocalizations.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Understanding Design Features of Music and Language: The Choric/Dialogic Distinction.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Unpredictability of the "when" influences prediction error processing of the "what" and "where".PloS one · 2022Article
- Western listeners detect boundary hierarchy in Indian music: a segmentation study.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Universal principles underlying segmental structures in parrot song and human speech.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Toward a Computational Neuroethology of Vocal Communication: From Bioacoustics to Neurophysiology, Emerging Tools and Future Directions.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Review
- Recursive music elucidates neural mechanisms supporting the generation and detection of melodic hierarchies.Brain structure & function · 2020Article
- Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross-species perspective.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2019Review
- The right inferior frontal gyrus processes nested non-local dependencies in music.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Hierarchical temporal structure in music, speech and animal vocalizations: jazz is like a conversation, humpbacks sing like hermit thrushes.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2017Article
- Linking Neural and Symbolic Representation and Processing of Conceptual Structures.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
- Temporal regularity increases with repertoire complexity in the Australian pied butcherbird's song.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human language, music and a variety of animal vocalizations constitute ways of sonic communication that exhibit remarkable structural complexity. While the complexities of language and possible parallels in animal communication have been discussed intensively, reflections on the complexity of music and animal song, and their comparisons, are underrepresented. In some ways, music and animal songs are more comparable to each other than to language as propositional semantics cannot be used as indicator of communicative success or wellformedness, and notions of grammaticality are less easily defined. This review brings together accounts of the principles of structure building in music and animal song. It relates them to corresponding models in formal language theory, the extended Chomsky hierarchy (CH), and their probabilistic counterparts. We further discuss common misunderstandings and shortcomings concerning the CH and suggest ways to move beyond. We discuss language, music and animal song in the context of their function and motivation and further integrate problems and issues that are less commonly addressed in the context of language, including continuous event spaces, features of sound and timbre, representation of temporality and interactions of multiple parallel feature streams. We discuss these aspects in the light of recent theoretical, cognitive, neuroscientific and modelling research in the domains of music, language and animal song.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.