How is birdsong composed? Listening to the Australian pied butcherbird

An international collaboration between musicians and birdsong scientists has found that in the Australian pied butcherbird songs surveyed, the order of song elements is strongly related to rhythmical timing. In a study published today on Australian pied butcherbirds in Royal Society Open Science, researchers found that the order of their song elements is strongly associated with the butcherbird's rhythmical timing. In the human brain, grammatical syntax and musical rhythm processing have been found to share cognitive resources in the human brain, and this research shows that songbirds could be processing syntactic-rhythmic relationships in a similar manner to humans. Dr Hollis Taylor, ARC Fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music , undertook this research along with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego. They found that the order of song elements in Australian pied butcherbird songs share a predictive relationship with how the song elements are rhythmically timed, and that this relationship is retained when the length of song elements is controlled. This suggests that the way syntax and rhythm interact with each other in pied butcherbird songs is not an artifact of simply producing song elements of different lengths in sequence. "It is extremely exciting," observes Dr Taylor.