Bilger Hans T, Vertosick Emily, Vickers Andrew, Kaczmarek Konrad, Prum Richard O
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas, Austin, TX, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 25;12:629456. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.629456. eCollection 2021.
Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called "music scrambling" with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements ("notes" or "syllables") and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more "musical" on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed from subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution.
鸟鸣声常常展现出诸如音高选择、节奏和旋律轮廓等音乐声学特征。我们使用一种名为“音乐加扰”的实验方法，对人类受试者进行研究，以探究鸟鸣声中更高阶的音乐时间结构。从20个鸟类分类群的系统发育多样化群体中录制的歌曲被拆分为组成元素（“音符”或“音节”），并以原始顺序和随机顺序重新组合。要求人类受试者在每个物种的基础上评估哪个版本听起来更“有音乐性”。向受试者隐瞒物种身份和刺激处理方式，并且在分类群内部和之间随机安排刺激呈现顺序。包含两段人类音乐录音作为注意力的对照。参与者对各个物种音乐性的评估各不相同，但总体而言，他们显著更倾向于将具有原始时间顺序的鸟鸣声评为比具有随机时间顺序的鸟鸣声更具音乐性。我们讨论了鸟类音乐性起源的其他假设，包括诚实信号、感知偏差和任意审美共同进化。
