Here we show how a migratory songbird, the chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina), achieves prompt and precise vocal imitation. Juvenile chipping sparrow males develop five to seven potential precursor songs; the normal development of these songs requires intact hearing but not imitation from external models. The potential precursor songs conform with general species-typical song parameters but ...

This paper describes a music browsing assistance service, Songrium (http://songrium.jp), which increases user enjoyment when listening to songs and allows visualization and exploration of a “Web of Music”. We define a Web of Music in this paper to be a network of “web-native music”, which we define in turn to be music that is published, shared, and remixed (has derivative works created) entirel...

We propose a novel approach for automatically constructing new songs from a set of given compositions that involves sampling a melody line as well as the corresponding harmonies given by chords. We empirically show that songs generated by our approach are closer to music composed by humans than those of existing methods 1. Composing music is a complex creative process that is not only restricte...

Horneros (Furnarius Rufus) are South American birds well known for their oven-looking nests and their ability to sing in couples. Previous work has analyzed the rhythmic organization of the duets, unveiling a mathematical structure behind the songs. In this work we analyze in detail an extended database of duets. The rhythms of the songs are compatible with the dynamics presented by a wide clas...

Many animals communicate in situations that make it difficult to discriminate a species' signals from those of others. Consequently, coexisting species usually have signals that differ by more than the minimum required to prevent overlap in acoustic features. These gaps between signals might facilitate detection and discrimination of degraded signals in noisy natural conditions. If so, percepti...

In behavior reminiscent of the responsiveness of human infants to speech, young songbirds innately recognize and prefer to learn the songs of their own species. The acoustic and physiological bases for innate recognition were investigated in fledgling white-crowned sparrows lacking song experience. A behavioral test revealed that the complete conspecific song was not essential for innate recogn...

Searching and organizing growing digital music collections requires automatic classification of music. This paper describes a new system, tested on the task of artist identification, that uses support vector machines to classify songs based on features calculated over their entire lengths. Since support vector machines are exemplarbased classifiers, training on and classifying entire songs inst...

In this study, the authors tested the cultural transmission of vocal traditions in cowbirds (Molothrus ater). Young cowbirds from a South Dakota (SD) population were housed over winter with adults of the SD population or with adults from an Indiana (IN) population. Song differences between the original SD and IN adult models were acquired by South Dakota culture (SDC) and Indiana culture (INC) ...

Many songs in large music databases are not labeled with semantic tags that could help users sort out the songs they want to listen to from those they do not. If the words that apply to a song can be predicted from audio, then those predictions can be used both to automatically annotate a song with tags, allowing users to get a sense of what qualities characterize a song at a glance. Automatic ...

We present a CBR approach to musical playlist recommendation. A good playlist is not merely a bunch of songs, but a selected collection of songs, arranged in a meaningful sequence, e.g. a good DJ creates good playlists. Our CBR approach focuses on recommending new and meaningful playlists, i.e. selecting a collection of songs that are arranged in a meaningful sequence. In the proposed approach,...