Birds of a feather: Human speech and birdsong have a lot in common, McGill study finds

Even though they're all around us, most of us don't think that much about bird songs. But some researchers at McGill have been thinking about them, a lot. And they found a pattern in bird songs that's connected to you and me. We were thinking about the structures of bird song and particularly looking at the zebrafinch, which is kind of a model organism for songbird research. So we went to this public repository, particularly one called Xeno-canto, which again is where anyone around the world can just upload songs that they recorded themselves. And then what we did was look at those files and we would find the songs within them and then visualize them. And we found that actually many of the patterns that are fundamental to humans across cultures are also found across lots of different species of birds. So what patterns are we talking about here? Well, to demonstrate, I'm going to record the opening lines to the classic children's book Goodnight Moon. Good night moon. Good night moon. Ah, Margaret Wise Brown. I like this one. In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon. In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon. This is a visual representation of that speech that we call a spectrogram, which helps us to identify the different units within the sample of speech. And one of the patterns that we find is that the syllables at the ends of phrases tend to be longer. And one of the things that you'll notice is that there tends to be these runs of frequencies so they have these all these in a row that go down and then goes up and then goes down. So those are the kinds of things we're looking at and we can then compare them to what we find in birds. So when we sing a song we tend to have these runs where the sequence of pitch goes up and down you know I don't know. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. I don't know. up and down rather than bouncing back and forth really rapidly between high and low pitch and you do again find that the last syllable in this song is the longest one. So birds do that and humans do that. Yeah exactly. One explanation for this would be based on these ideas about motor constraints. So both humans and birds have to produce sound and we do it with some similar mechanisms. So, you know, we use lungs to pass air across these vocal cords that vibrate and those vibrations make sounds. And so that basic similarity there means that some things might be related to that. Could be that these signals evolve so that they're easy to understand. One example of that is this elongation at the ends of our phrases. Because that helps receivers cue in on when the phrase is ending, maybe it's their turn to speak or sing now. So a bird might be elongating the last part of its song to signal to other birds that okay, I'm done, your turn. Yeah, your turn, or exactly, this is now kind of the complete, the completed end. So what's next for this research? Well, there are a lot more noisy animals out there. I also study the communication systems of other animals such as frogs and bats and other primates than humans and so thinking about how these these patterns might vary more even more broadly across the tree of life I think will be really interesting to uncover.