Melatonin affects the temporal pattern of vocal signatures in birds.

In humans and other animals, melatonin is involved in the control of circadian biological rhythms. Here, we show that melatonin affects the temporal pattern of behavioral sequences in a noncircadian manner. The zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) song and the crow of the Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) are courtship vocalizations composed of a stereotyped sequence of syllables.

Age-related changes in the Bengalese finch song motor program.

It is well established that there are remarkable similarities between song learning in oscine birds and acquisition of speech in young children. Human speech shows marked changes with senescence, but few studies have evaluated how song changes with advanced age in songbirds. To investigate the effect of old age on song, we compared song of old Bengalese finches (Lonchura striata domestica) with that of middle-aged birds.

De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch.

Culture is typically viewed as consisting of traits inherited epigenetically, through social learning. However, cultural diversity has species-typical constraints, presumably of genetic origin. A celebrated, if contentious, example is whether a universal grammar constrains syntactic diversity in human languages.

Dynamics of crowing development in the domestic Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica).

Species-specific behaviours gradually emerge, via incomplete patterns, to the final complete adult form. A classical example is birdsong, a learned behaviour ideally suited for studying the neural and molecular substrates of vocal learning. Young songbirds gradually transform primitive unstructured vocalizations (subsong, akin to human babbling) into complex, stereotyped sequences of syllables that constitute adult song.

A technique for characterizing the development of rhythms in bird song.

The developmental trajectory of nervous system dynamics shows hierarchical structure on time scales spanning ten orders of magnitude from milliseconds to years. Analyzing and characterizing this structure poses significant signal processing challenges. In the context of birdsong development, we have previously proposed that an effective way to do this is to use the dynamic spectrum or spectrogram, a classical signal processing tool, computed at multiple time scales in a nested fashion.