In many duet-singing songbirds, paired birds combine their song types nonrandomly to form duet songs. Several different behavioral mechanisms could generate nonrandom song type associations in duets. I tested female Black-bellied Wrens (Thryothorus fasciatoventris) for one such mechanism: adherence to a set of rules linking female response songs to male stimulus songs. I call this set of rules ...

Acoustic signals play a fundamental role in avian territory defence and mate attraction. Several studies have now shown that spectral properties of bird song differ between urban and rural environments. Previously this has been attributed to competition for acoustic space as a result of low-frequency noise present in cities. However, the physical structure of urban areas may have a contributory...

Humpback whales have a continually evolving vocal sexual display, or "song," that appears to undergo both evolutionary and "revolutionary" change. All males within a population adhere to the current content and arrangement of the song. Populations within an ocean basin share similarities in their songs; this sharing is complex as multiple variations of the song (song types) may be present withi...

The speech-to-song illusion has attracted interest as a probe of the perceptual interface between language and music. One might anticipate differential speech-to-song effects in tonal vs. non-tonal languages, since these language classes differ importantly in the linguistic value they assign to tones. Here we addressed this issue for the first time in a cohort of 20 healthy younger adults whose...

The song-control system, a neural circuit that controls the learning and production of birdsong, provided the first example in vertebrates of prominent macro-morphological sex differences in the brain. Forebrain nuclei HVC, robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA) and area X all exhibit prominent male-biased sex differences in volume in zebra finches and canaries. Subsequent studies compared spec...

The Bengalese finch Lonchura striata var. domestica is a domesticated strain of a wild species, the white-rumped munia Lonchura striata of Southeast Asia. Bengalese finches have been domesticated in Japan for 240 years. Comparing their song syntax with that of their wild ancestors, we found that the domesticated strain has highly complex, conspicuous songs with finite-state syntax, while the wi...

In birds and mammals, including humans, melatonin-binding sites are abundant in brain areas that have no known clock function. Although the role of such binding sites is still unclear, it is assumed that these sites link neural functions to circadian or circannual demands of neuroendocrine homeostasis and reproduction. To investigate a possible direct role of melatonin in motor control, we stud...

Terrence J. Sejnowski Howard Hughes Medical Institute UCSD and Salk Institute, San Diego, CA 92186-5800, USA Songbirds learn to imitate a tutor song through auditory and motor learning. We have developed a theoretical framework for song learning that accounts for response properties of neurons that have been observed in many of the nuclei that are involved in song learning. Specifically, we sug...

This article deals with the analysis of the semantic content of the anonymous Russian-speaking forum 2ch.hk, different verbal means of expressing of the emotional state of aggression are revealed for this site, and aggression is classified by its directions. The lexis of different Russian-and Englishspeaking anonymous forums (2ch.hk and iichan.hk, 4chan.org) and public community “MDK” of the Ru...

—Studies of song and its function in suboscine passerines are rare. We examined spatial and temporal variation in song structure in a wild population of Olive-sided Flycatchers (Contopus cooperi) and tested among hypotheses explaining this variation. Repeatable variation in song type was observed both within and among individuals. More than 10% of territorial males expressed atypical song types...