Dataset Information

Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition.

ABSTRACT: Humans easily recognize "transposed" musical melodies shifted up or down in log frequency. Surprisingly, songbirds seem to lack this capacity, although they can learn to recognize human melodies and use complex acoustic sequences for communication. Decades of research have led to the widespread belief that songbirds, unlike humans, are strongly biased to use absolute pitch (AP) in melody recognition. This work relies almost exclusively on acoustically simple stimuli that may belie sensitivities to more complex spectral features. Here, we investigate melody recognition in a species of songbird, the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris), using tone sequences that vary in both pitch and timbre. We find that small manipulations altering either pitch or timbre independently can drive melody recognition to chance, suggesting that both percepts are poor descriptors of the perceptual cues used by birds for this task. Instead we show that melody recognition can generalize even in the absence of pitch, as long as the spectral shapes of the constituent tones are preserved. These results challenge conventional views regarding the use of pitch cues in nonhuman auditory sequence recognition.

SUBMITTER: Bregman MR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4760803 | biostudies-other | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Publications

Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition.

Bregman Micah R MR Patel Aniruddh D AD Gentner Timothy Q TQ

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20160125 6

Humans easily recognize "transposed" musical melodies shifted up or down in log frequency. Surprisingly, songbirds seem to lack this capacity, although they can learn to recognize human melodies and use complex acoustic sequences for communication. Decades of research have led to the widespread belief that songbirds, unlike humans, are strongly biased to use absolute pitch (AP) in melody recognition. This work relies almost exclusively on acoustically simple stimuli that may belie sensitivities ...[more]

PMID: 26811447

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Project description:Pitch patterns, such as melodies, consist of two levels of structure: a global level, comprising the pattern of ups and downs, or contour; and a local level, comprising the precise intervals that make up this contour. An influential neuropsychological model suggests that these two levels of processing are hierarchically linked, with processing of the global structure occurring within the right hemisphere in advance of local processing within the left. However, the predictions of this model and its anatomical basis have not been tested in neurologically normal individuals. The present study used fMRI and required participants to listen to consecutive pitch sequences while performing a same/different one-back task. Sequences, when different, either preserved (local) or violated (global) the contour of the sequence preceding them. When the activations for the local and global conditions were contrasted directly, additional activation was seen for local processing in right planum temporale and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). The presence of additional activation for local over global processing supports the hierarchical view that the global structure of a pitch sequence acts as a "framework" on which the local detail is subsequently hung. However, the lateralisation of activation seen in the present study, with global processing occurring in left pSTS and local processing occurring bilaterally, differed from that predicted by the neuroanatomical model. A re-examination of the individual lesion data on which the neuroanatomical model is based revealed that the lesion data equally well support the laterality scheme suggested by our data. While the present study supports the hierarchical view of local and global processing, there is an evident need for further research, both in patients and neurologically normal individuals, before an understanding of the functional lateralisation of local and global processing can be considered established.

Dataset Information

Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition.

Publications

Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition.

Similar Datasets

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