New Delhi, June 8: North American mockingbirds, Mimus polygottos are famous for their ability to imitate songs of other birds and environment. They do not exactly imitate, but compose their own songs based on the melodies of other birds.
An associative team of researchers which included neuroscientist Tina Roeske of Max Planck Institute of Empirical Aesthetics, field biologist Dave Gammon of Elon University, and music philosopher David Rothenberg of New Jersey Institute of Technology, studied how mockingbirds do these imitations, by analysing song material from five individual mockingbirds. They found out that these birds follow four compositional strategies to transit from one sound to the next. They are: changing timbre (tone), changing pitch, stretching transition (lengthening it in time) and squeezing it (shortening it in time). Thus, these birds follow the same musical rules as those found in human music.
The researchers combined their different approaches and areas of expertise to conduct this highly unusual study. This research has been published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
-With inputs from Aryaa Sinha
