Female cowbirds raised in auditory isolated from males responded to the songs of male cowbirds with copulatory postures. The songs of males reared in isolated were more effective in eliciting the posture than the songs of normally reared males. The females did not respond to the songs of other species. These results indicate one mechanism of species identification for this parasitic species.

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 and hold its listeners’ attention and might make use of similar strategies to achieve this goal. We here tested a songbird’s rhythm, as rep...

We analyze a dataset providing the complete information on the effective plays of thousands of music listeners during several months. Our analysis confirms a number of properties previously highlighted by research based on interviews and questionnaires, but also uncover new statistical patterns, both at the individual and collective levels. In particular, we show that individuals follow common ...

BACKGROUND Language deficits in people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) manifest, among other things, in a gradual deterioration of spontaneous speech. People with AD tend to speak less as the disease progresses and their speech becomes confused. However, the ability to sing old tunes sometimes remains intact throughout the disease. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to explore the role of ...

Black-capped Chickadee (Parus atricapillus) song consists of two notes, termed fee and bee. Frequency measures at three key points (at the start and end offee, and at the start of bee) were obtained from the songs of a large sample of chickadees (n = 15 1) in the wild. In this sample, 19 birds produced songs shifted downward in frequency as well as their normal songs. Analysis of normal song re...

Many species of songbirds produce songs of unusually low amplitude during aggressive encounters (Dabelsteen et al. 1998); such low amplitude songs have been variously termed ‘soft songs’ (Nice 1943), ‘strangled songs’ (Snow 1958), and ‘quiet songs’ (Dabelsteen et al. 1998). In some species, soft songs are produced in courtship as well as in aggression, but in our study species, the song sparrow...

Choice of a particular mate phenotype may arise out of experience with the very phenotypes under consideration. Female European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) prefer males that sing predominantly long-bout songs over males that sing predominantly short-bout songs, and thus, song-bout length is a phenotypic parameter instrumental in releasing the female's mate choice. The preferred long-bout songs...

Animals use acoustic signals to defend resources against rivals and attract breeding partners. As with many biological traits, acoustic signals may reflect ancestry; closely related species often produce more similar signals than do distantly related species. Whether this similarity in acoustic signals is biologically relevant to animals is poorly understood. We conducted a playback experiment ...