Songbirds reveal secrets of common patterns in music

Whether it is Italian opera or music from northern India, studies have shown there are certain musical patterns that are common not only to various genres, but also across cultures.

Now, a study including one of an Indian-origin has discovered that these common traits may come from constraints to the way people sing, thanks to songbirds.

“We were intrigued by certain widespread features of human song melody across different cultures and genres of music, whether it was Italian opera or music from northern India,” said co-author of the study Frank Russo, director of Ryerson’s SMART (Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology) laboratory.

“We wanted to test the idea to see if this was due to the mechanics of how we produce sound,” he stated.

Adam Tierney, a post-doctoral fellow at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, is the study’s lead author and Aniruddh Patel, senior fellow in theoretical neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute at San Diego, California, is the study’s other co-author.

Tierney, Russo and Patel examined a database of over 9,400 folk songs from 32 geographic locations worldwide for common musical patterns such as melodic arches and lengthening the final note after each musical phrase.

The researchers then compiled sample recordings of birdsongs from 54 songbird families, to examine similar vocal patterns that appeared in humans.

They found that humans and birds, who share some similar vocal constraints on sound production, create similar music patterns such as melodic arches.

“This melodic arch comes from how people breathe when they sing,” said Tierney.

“People take a breath, sing while exhaling, and then take another breath. Songbirds also sing while exhaling, but when they take a breath, they do so between each note. This leads to a tendency for melodic arch shapes in individual notes,” he added.

The study has been published in the current issue of the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.