What Are Birds Singing About? They Say More Than We Thought
Artificial intelligence has firmly established itself in many fields of science. It may help us uncover the rules governing birdsong — and even its meanings.
By Wojciech Mamak
For a long time, studying bird communication meant a lot of squinting. The human ear is too slow to catch the split-second nuances in a chaffinch's trill. The sound had to be frozen in visual form. In the mid-twentieth century, researchers used early sound spectrographs that converted bird music into visual data — a jagged graph (a spectrogram) representing the time and frequencies of a recorded sound. To find the "grammar" of birdsong, one had to determine visually where one syllable ended on the graph and the next began.
To obtain a spectrogram that a human could interpret, however, a bird had to be recorded in a soundproofed laboratory chamber. But wild birds don't sing in a soundless vacuum. They sing in a raucous, chaotic theatre of rustling leaves, the patter of rain, the crack of branches, and the overlapping voices of a dozen other species. For researchers and early algorithms, the natural environment was too noisy to analyze in depth.
