Department of Psychology, Aichi University, Toyohashi, Japan.
PLoS One. 2021 Sep 3;16(9):e0256613. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256613. eCollection 2021.
It is known among aviculturists that cockatiels imitate human music with their whistle-like vocal sounds. The present study examined whether cockatiels are also able to sing "in unison", or, line up their vocalizations with a musical melody so that they occur at the same time. Three hand-raised cockatiels were exposed to a musical melody of human whistling produced by an experimenter. All the birds learned to sing the melody. Then, two out of these three birds spontaneously joined in singing during an ongoing melody, so that the singing by the bird and the whistling by the human were nearly perfectly synchronous. Further experiments revealed that the birds actively adjusted their vocal timing to playback of a recording of the same melody. This means cockatiels have a remarkable ability for flexible vocal control similar to what is seen in human singing. The proximate/ultimate factors for this behavior and implications for musicality in humans are discussed.
养鸟人都知道，玄凤鹦鹉能用它们口哨般的鸣叫声模仿人类的音乐。本研究旨在探究玄凤鹦鹉是否也能“齐唱”，也就是使它们的鸣叫与音乐旋律同步。研究人员用口哨吹奏出一段人类的音乐旋律，对三只手养大的玄凤鹦鹉进行了测试。所有的鸟儿都学会了唱这段旋律。然后，这三只鸟中的两只在正在播放的旋律中自发地加入了歌唱，使得鸟儿的鸣唱和人类的口哨声几乎完全同步。进一步的实验表明，鸟儿会主动调整它们的发声时间，以适应相同旋律的回放。这意味着玄凤鹦鹉具有类似人类歌唱的显著的灵活发声控制能力。对这种行为的近因和远因以及其对人类音乐性的意义进行了讨论。
