I'd Like to Teach the Bird to Sing

♪With perfect memory.♪ Oh for chrissakes, now I can't get that song out of my head.

Dec. 8, 2004 – University of Utah scientists taught baby sparrows to sing a complete song even though the birds were exposed only to overlapping segments of the tune rather than the full melody. The study provides clues about how musical memories are stored in the brain and how those memories help birds learn to sing...

In the first experiment, the scientists played one segment or phrase of the sparrow song at a time, separated by 2.5-second silences. They played the segments in reverse order – E, then D, then C, B and A – to control against the birds simply storing what they heard (ABCDE) in short-term memory and repeating it. The nine birds in this experiment could not string the segments together in the right order to sing the entire song ABCDE.

Next, eight young sparrows were played two segments or snippets of their song at a time. Each pair of segments was in the correct order, but the pairs of segments were played backward – DE, then CD, BC and AB. Because each pair of song segments overlapped another one, these birds were able to string the segments together in the correct order and sing the full song ABCDE. Plamondon says that when birds hear two song segments at a time, they implicitly learn the rules for putting all five segments together.

In a final experiment, five sparrows heard pairs of song segments, with each pair in reverse order: BA, then CB, DC and ED. The birds again learned to string the segments together, but because the segments were reversed, they sang with the segments strung together backward – EDCBA.

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