Relative pitch perception in animals has been difficult to demonstrate. This failing is due in part to stimulus sets that make an absolute pitch solution viable. In Experiment 1, starlings failed to acquire a discrimination that could be solved only on the basis of relative pitch. In Experiment 2, starlings were trained on a smaller set of pitch patterns, for which both absolute and relative pitch solutions were available, then tested with three series of unreinforced probe stimuli. Series 1 assessed stimulus control by absolute pitch. In Series 2, absolute pitch cues dictated one response, and relative pitch cues dictated a different response. Results indicate that starlings extract relative pitch from artificial pitch patterns only after acquiring a discrimination that permits both absolute and relative pitch solutions. Results are discussed in terms of the relative salience of absolute and relative pitch.
Musicians and ethnomusicologists have long been interested in the idea of musical universals, the proposition that features of musical structure are common to the music of all human cultures. Recently, the development of new techniques and new theory makes it possible to ask whether the perceptual principles underlying music span not just human cultures but also other nonhuman species. A series of experiments addressing this issue from a comparative perspective show that a songbird, the European starling, can perceive pitch relations, a form of musical universal. However, the species transposes pitch relations across large shifts in tone height with difficulty. Instead, songbirds show a preference for learning pitch patterns on the basis of the absolute pitch of component tones. These results suggest further comparative studies of music perception may be especially worthwhile, not just for gathering new information about animals, but also for highlighting the principles that make human music perception unique.
We report data bearing on the ability of European starlings to generalize a serial auditory pitch pattern discrimination from one frequency range to another. In earlier research (e.g., Hulse & Cynx, 1985),European starlings failed to generalize such a discrimination from one Loctave range offrequencies to another l-octave range above or below the initial training range. The starlings thus demonstrated a hitherto unknown phenomenon, the frequency range constraint. In the present research, we first explored the frequency limits over which the range constraint might hold. The constraint was obtained after initial training in both a narrow (V2-octave) and a wide (3-octave) training range. The latter range encompasses a substantial portion of the entire frequency range audible to starlings. Therefore, the constraint is independent of the size of the training range. No known principles of stimulus discrimination or generalization account for the constraint. We also obtained further evidence on starlings' sensitivity to relative pitch in auditory pattern perception. We used probe stimuli to explore pattern discrimination in narrow local regions of the wide frequency range. The probe data showed that, in spite of the frequency range constraint, the starlings were able to process pitch patterns on a relational basis. The results join earlier data indicating that both absolute and relative pitch processing may be involved in the natural auditory communication of songbirds. In several recent experiments, European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) have learned to discriminate between two sets of sound patterns. In one set, tones always rose in frequency; in the other, they always fell. Discrimination performance was then examined when the frequencies of pattern tones were shifted above, below, or within the range of frequencies in which the rising/falling discrimination had been learned initially (Cynx, Hulse, &
Nine canaries (Serinus canaria) and 8 European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were tested for responsiveness to conspecific song, alien song, or no sound at all. Responsiveness was assessed by letting the birds choose among perches associated with the different auditory stimuli. The birds were tested when they were adapted to short and to long photoperiods. The results showed that both species responded to song, especially conspecific song, more in the long-day condition than in the short-day one. For canaries, but not for starlings, perch selection also varied as a function of sex. These data show that responsiveness to song in songbirds changes as a function of day length. An important implication of this result is that song perception, as well as song production, may change with the photoperiod.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.