Humans, but not songbirds, produce spontaneously isochronous song through the lifespan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Isochrony – as in the regular beat of a metronome - is cross-culturally ubiquitous in music. Is this ubiquity due to a widespread biological inclination for acoustic communication having isochronous structure? If so, it should be present in lesser-studied vocal music, in the absence of musical training, and in comparable non-human species’ vocalizations. We quantified isochrony in an untrained expression of musicality: improvised songs from non-musician adults and children. We also tested for isochrony in songs from zebra finches, a bird that learns complex songs. We analyzed improvised songs from children (n = 38, 3-10 years old) and adult non-musicians (n = 15, 24-82 years old), and songs from juvenile and adult zebra finches (n= 77, ∼50 and 120 days post-hatch, respectively). Isochrony was expressed in non-musicians’ improvised songs, and in children’s improvised songs to a comparable degree. In contrast, both juvenile and adult zebra finches produced songs with less isochrony than chance. And although zebra finches learn sequences and durations of their songs’ elements, we found no evidence for the learning of isochrony. These data show that spontaneous isochrony in learned vocalizations appears differently across these two species. We propose that species variation in chorusing behaviors may explain why.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".