Studio sessions show how Bengalese finch stays in tune

Julian Richards, deputy editor, newscientist.com

(Image: Sam Sober/Emory University)

Let's take it from the top again... Human singing stars these days rely on Auto-Tune technology to produce the right pitch, but this songbird does it the old way - by listening out for its own mistakes. And it's also smart enough to ignore notes that are too far off to be true.

Brains monitor their owners' physical actions via the senses, and use this feedback to correct mistakes in those actions. Many models of learning assume that the bigger the perceived mistake, the bigger the correction will be. Samuel Sober at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Michael Brainard of the University of California, San Francisco, suspected that the system is a bit cleverer than that - otherwise, for instance, a bird might over-correct its singing if it confused external sounds with its own voice, or if its brain made a mistake in processing sounds.

They decided to fool Bengalese finches into thinking that they were singing out of tune, and measured what happened at different levels of this apparent tone-deafness. To do this, they fitted the birds with the stylish headphones shown in the photo above and fed them back the sound of their own singing, processed to sound sharper than it really was. The researchers sharpened the birdsong by degrees ranging from a quarter-tone to one-and-a-half tones. They found that the birds learned to "correct" their pitch more accurately and more quickly when they heard a smaller mistake than when they heard a large one. It was also clear that the bird brains took "errors" seriously when they fell within the normal range of pitches in the bird's song: the birds seemed to ignore errors outside this range.?

Let's just hope all this media exposure doesn't go their heads - they're better unplugged.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1213622109

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/26d5a251/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C120Cbengalese0Efinch0Eheadphones0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

SEC Championship Game 2012 kansas city chiefs Javon Belcher express kindle fire Jenny Johnson olivier martinez