ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Interval singing links to phenotypic quality in a songbird.
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 8 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
8 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Chicks produce consonant, sometimes jazzy, sounds.Biology letters · 2024Article
- When sounds come alive: animacy in the auditory sense.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Lessons learned in animal acoustic cognition through comparisons with humans.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Is consonance attractive to budgerigars? No evidence from a place preference study.Animal cognition · 2020Article
- "Hearken to the Hermit-Thrush": A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Listening.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Article
- Animal Pitch Perception: Melodies and Harmonies.Comparative cognition & behavior reviews · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Darwin was fascinated by melodic performances of insects, fish, birds, mammals, and men. He considered the ability to produce musical notes without direct use the most mysterious endowment of mankind. Bird song is attributed to sexual selection, but it remains unknown how the expected relationship between melodic performance and phenotypic quality arises. Melodies consist of sequences of notes, and both Pythagoras and music theorists in the Middle Ages found that their tonal frequencies form simple ratios that correspond to small-integer proportions derived from the harmonic series. Harmonics are acoustically predictable, and thus form the basis of the natural, just tuning system in music. Here I analyze the songs of the great tit (
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.