The flutelike song of the hermit thrush ( Catharus guttatus ) , a common North American bird renowned for its musicality , shares several characteristic with human euphony . Thestudy , published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesthis calendar week , is the first evidence of a bird Sung dynasty that hit use of the same mathematical principles underlying Western and many non - westerly melodic scales – demonstrating the surprising intersection between human and animal song finish .
There ’s a long - fly the coop debate about the extent to which the social structure of human melodic weighing machine derives from biological aspects ( such as our auditive perception and vocal production ) or as the intersection of historical , ethnic accidents . In other actor’s line , is the origin of human music more biological or more ethnical ? For tote up linear perspective , researchers have turned increasingly to birdie and heavyweight .
If human music is culturally bound or drug-addicted on specific characteristics of our voice and hearing system , then these trait should be absent from brute vocalizations . “ If an aspect of euphony is found not only in human beings , but also in a diversity of non - human species , this would suggest that there may be something in our shared biology that predisposes us to find that aspect interesting , or attractive , or easy to sing,”saysstudy coauthorEmily Doolittle of the Cornish College of the Arts .
So , Doolittle and a team led byW. Tecumseh Fitch from the University of Viennastudied song recordings of 14 male hermit thrush taste throughout the U.S. They dissect the pitch and frequency of sounds in 71 Sung dynasty case that contain 10 or more notes . “ The thought that hermit thrushes sing scales – particularly pentatonic [ five - note ] scales – seems to have seize the human imagination and has been repeated so often that many multitude assume it is true,”Doolittle tell Smithsonian . The team ab initio set out to refute these claims … they were surprised .
fit in to their statistical models , most of the hermit thrushes ’ songs check musical scales that are mathematically similar to the harmonic series commonly used in our melodious scales . A harmonic serial , Smithsonian explains , includes a fundamental root word note followed by notes that continue to increase in audio frequency base on multiple of that note . This mathematical distribution is known as whole number multiples .
what is more , the selection of this frequency does n’t come from biologic constraints of the hermit thrush ’s outspoken tract . Rather , the males simply seem to prefer singing in harmonic series . peradventure these notes are easier for the male to recollect , Science explains , or perhaps they allow a ready yard measure for female recluse thrushes to value them with . Either mode , scale leaf determination , it would seem , is n’t unique to humans and may be both culturally and biologically regulate .
Image : Matt Tillettvia FlickrCC BY 2.0
