ArticleScientific reports2018
Multifractal analysis reveals music-like dynamic structure in songbird rhythms.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Accelerando and crescendo in African penguin ecstatic display songs.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- An evolutionary model of rhythmic accelerando in animal vocal signalling.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Comparative Analysis of Preference in Contemporary and Earlier Texts Using Entropy Measures.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- 1/f laws found in non-human music.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Syntactic modulation of rhythm in Australian pied butcherbird song.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A primer on rhythm quantification for fish sounds: a Mediterranean case study.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Perceiving and remembering speech depend on multifractal nonlinearity in movements producing and exploring speech.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Higher-Order Musical Temporal Structure in Bird Song.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Perception of Nigerian Dùndún Talking Drum Performances as Speech-Like vs. Music-Like: The Role of Familiarity and Acoustic Cues.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Mockingbird Morphing Music: Structured Transitions in a Complex Bird Song.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Fractality and Variability in Canonical and Non-Canonical English Fiction and in Non-Fictional Texts.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Categorical Rhythms Are Shared between Songbirds and Humans.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
- Complexity in Economic and Social Systems: Cryptocurrency Market at around COVID-19.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Parallels in the sequential organization of birdsong and human speech.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Ontogeny of vocal rhythms in harbor seal pups: an exploratory study.Current zoology · 2019Article
- Bringing the Nonlinearity of the Movement System to Gestural Theories of Language Use: Multifractal Structure of Spoken English Supports the Compensation for Coarticulation in Human Speech Perception.Frontiers in physiology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Music is thought to engage its listeners by driving feelings of surprise, tension, and relief through a dynamic mixture of predictable and unpredictable patterns, a property summarized here as "expressiveness". Birdsong shares with music the goal to attract its listeners' attention and might use similar strategies to achieve this. We here tested a thrush nightingale's (Luscinia luscinia) rhythm, as represented by song amplitude envelope (containing information on note timing, duration, and intensity), for evidence of expressiveness. We used multifractal analysis, which is designed to detect in a signal dynamic fluctuations between predictable and unpredictable states on multiple timescales (e.g. notes, subphrases, songs). Results show that rhythm is strongly multifractal, indicating fluctuations between predictable and unpredictable patterns. Moreover, comparing original songs with re-synthesized songs that lack all subtle deviations from the "standard" note envelopes, we find that deviations in note intensity and duration significantly contributed to multifractality. This suggests that birdsong is more dynamic due to subtle note timing patterns, often similar to musical operations like accelerando or crescendo. While different sources of these dynamics are conceivable, this study shows that multi-timescale rhythm fluctuations can be detected in birdsong, paving the path to studying mechanisms and function behind such patterns.
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