ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Divergent processing strategies for auditory sequence recognition in humans and zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata).Communications biology · 2026Article
- Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) can show spontaneous vocal flexibility when exposed to dynamically changing rhythmic sounds.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Core systems of music perception.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Gradient boosted decision trees reveal nuances of auditory discrimination behavior.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Recognizing structure in novel tunes: differences between human and rats.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Wild nightingales flexibly match whistle pitch in real time.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Meaning in Music Is Intentional, but in Soundscape It Is Not-A Naturalistic Approach to the Qualia of Sounds.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Review
- An allometric prior enhances acoustic niche partitioning signal.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Detecting surface changes in a familiar tune: exploring pitch, tempo and timbre.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Musicality in human vocal communication: an evolutionary perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Learning metrics on spectrotemporal modulations reveals the perception of musical instrument timbre.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- On reappearance and complexity in musical calling.PloS one · 2021Article
- Toward a Computational Neuroethology of Vocal Communication: From Bioacoustics to Neurophysiology, Emerging Tools and Future Directions.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Review
- Time-dependent discrimination advantages for harmonic sounds suggest efficient coding for memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Observational
- Finding, visualizing, and quantifying latent structure across diverse animal vocal repertoires.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Article
- Origins of music in credible signaling.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2020Article
- Auditory Selectivity for Spectral Contrast in Cortical Neurons and Behavior.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Song Is More Memorable Than Speech Prosody: Discrete Pitches Aid Auditory Working Memory.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Humans easily recognize "transposed" musical melodies shifted up or down in log frequency. Surprisingly, songbirds seem to lack this capacity, although they can learn to recognize human melodies and use complex acoustic sequences for communication. Decades of research have led to the widespread belief that songbirds, unlike humans, are strongly biased to use absolute pitch (AP) in melody recognition. This work relies almost exclusively on acoustically simple stimuli that may belie sensitivities to more complex spectral features. Here, we investigate melody recognition in a species of songbird, the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris), using tone sequences that vary in both pitch and timbre. We find that small manipulations altering either pitch or timbre independently can drive melody recognition to chance, suggesting that both percepts are poor descriptors of the perceptual cues used by birds for this task. Instead we show that melody recognition can generalize even in the absence of pitch, as long as the spectral shapes of the constituent tones are preserved. These results challenge conventional views regarding the use of pitch cues in nonhuman auditory sequence recognition.
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