The beautiful sound of birdsongs emerging from the trees is a wonderful example of how much nature can still teach us, even as much about their origins are still mysterious to us. About 40 percent of bird species learn to vocalize when they are exposed to a tutor, a behavior of interest to many neurologists and neurobiologists. The other 60 percent can vocalize instinctually in isolation. The variety across species, and the relationship between the nervous system and biomechanics makes birdsong production a complex process to unravel and understand.
Physicist Gabriel Mindlin, from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, has been looking at the phenomena from what is one of the most unifying and potentially enlightening perspectives of the issue: the dynamical physics of birds' vocal organs. In his recent, in-depth review of the topic, published this week in the journal Chaos, he explores the role of fundamental physics properties in the acoustic complexity of birdsong, and the relationship they have with neural instructions for their production.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-nonlinear-physics-bridges-thoughts-birdsong.html#jCp
The beautiful sound of birdsongs emerging from the trees is a wonderful example of how much nature can still teach us, even as much about their origins are still mysterious to us. About 40 percent of bird species learn to vocalize when they are exposed to a tutor, a behavior of interest to many neurologists and neurobiologists. The other 60 percent can vocalize instinctually in isolation. The variety across species, and the relationship between the nervous system and biomechanics makes birdsong production a complex process to unravel and understand.
Physicist Gabriel Mindlin, from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, has been looking at the phenomena from what is one of the most unifying and potentially enlightening perspectives of the issue: the dynamical physics of birds' vocal organs. In his recent, in-depth review of the topic, published this week in the journal Chaos, he explores the role of fundamental physics properties in the acoustic complexity of birdsong, and the relationship they have with neural instructions for their production.