Sometimes birds really behave like musicians

New study shows that sometimes birds really behave like musicians
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Some songbirds follow musical principles used by human musicians, according to an international team of researchers from the City University of New York, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the Freie Universität Berlin and Macquarie University in Australia.
The paper, published in Royal Society Open Science, examines the song of Australia’s pied butcherbirds, one of the world’s most musical birds. CUNY PhD student Eathan Janney based his analysis upon the years of data collected and analyzed by violinist and biomusicologist Hollis Taylor, who has previously published extremely detailed analyses of butcherbird songs. “Since pied butcherbird songs share so many commonalities with human music,” Taylor writes, “this species could possibly revolutionize the way we think about the core values of music.”
In the past, claims of musical principles in birdsong were largely met with skepticism and dismissed as wishful thinking by biased listeners. The new paper, “Temporal regularity increases with repertoire complexity in the Australian pied butcherbird’s song,” demonstrates, with extensive statistical and objective analysis, that the more complex a bird’s repertoire, the better he or she is at singing in time, arraying his options rhythmically far better than birds who know fewer songs.
Co-author Ofer Tchernichovski, professor in the psychology department of Hunter College, finds that the birds “balance their performance to keep it in a sweet spot between boredom and confusion...” Constance Scharff, a co-author who directs the animal behavior laboratory at the Freie Universität Berlin, says “pied butcherbirds, not unlike jazz musicians, play around with their tunes, balancing repetition and variation.”
This finding suggests that musical virtuosity, the ability to sing long and apparently musical songs, may not be a byproduct of the evolution of more practical abilities, but may be an important trait of great value in the life of songbirds, also providing evidence that musical ability in birds may be a precursor to the evolution of musical ability in humans.
The paper is unusual in that it relies on input from biologists, neuroscientists, engineers, and musicians.
“Science and music may have different criteria for truth,” says David Rothenberg, professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and another co-author, “but sometimes their insights need to be put together to make sense of the beautiful performances we find in nature.”