Birdsong is regarded as a classic example of a sexually-selected trait and has been primarily studied in systems with male song. Complex solo female song is emerging from the shadows of overlooked phenomena. In males, rearing conditions affect male song complexity, and males with complex songs are often more successful at mate attraction and territorial defense. Little is known about the ontoge...

Adult male zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), as closed-ended learners, normally crystallize their songs at 90 days of age, and the song remains fixed throughout life (Price, 1979). We show that injuring the tracheosyringeal nerve(s) (each of which innervates the ipsilateral half of the syrinx, the avian vocal organ) results in a short-term deficit in the syllables forming adult male song; th...

Birdsong is a learned, sequenced motor skill. For the zebra finch, learned song normally remains unchanging beyond early adulthood. However, stable adult song will gradually deteriorate after deafening (Nordeen and Nordeen, 1992), indicating an ongoing influence of auditory feedback on learned song. This plasticity of adult song in response to deafening gradually declines with age (Lombardino a...

Birdsong is a sexually selected signal that is learned early in life. Song learning (imitative vocal learning) by male songbirds has been extensively studied, but other aspects of development are important in birdsong as well. Female experience with song can affect song preferences in some species but not in others. The neural responses to song in females, as assessed by immediate-early gene ex...

Skylarks inhabit open fields and perform an aerial song display which serves as a territorial signal. The particularly long and elaborate structure of this song flight raises questions about the impact of physical and energetic constraints acting on a communication signal. Song produced during the three distinct phases of the flight - ascending, level and descending phase could be subject to di...

We present Song Prompter, a software system that acts as a performance assistant by showing horizontally scrolling lyrics and chords in a graphical user interface, together with an audio accompaniment consisting of bass and MIDI drums. Both alignment and accompaniment are automatically calculated from the original song recording. A song outline displays the song structure, including names and p...

Motor patterns of songs of swamp and song sparrows, Melospiza georgiana and M. melodia, deafened early in life display a significant degree of species-specific structure. Normal songs of the two species differ in the degree to which they are segmented. Swamp sparrow song consists of a single segment, and song sparrow songs are multisegmental. Song and swamp sparrows were deafened at 17 to 23 da...

Bird song is hypothesized to be a reliable indicator of cognition because it depends on brain structure and function. Song features have been found to correlate positively with measures of cognition, but the relationship between song and cognition is complicated because not all cognitive abilities are themselves positively correlated. If cognition is not a unitary trait, developmental constrain...

We investigated the development of within-song type variation in song sparrows, Melospiza melodia, with two experiments designed to determine how exposure to within-type variation influences the song-learning process and whether within-type variation itself is a learned trait. In the first experiment, we compared learning between two groups of males, one group tutored exclusively with song mode...