Likewise, songbirds and humans share evolutionarily convergent features of their vocal production biomechanics ( 11, 12) and of brain circuitry that underlies the rare trait of vocal learning ( 13, 14). Although birds lack the six-layered mammalian neocortex ( 5), the avian auditory system follows the general vertebrate plan ( 6), including telencephalic circuits organized in a radial columnar pattern that are anatomically ( 7, 8), genetically ( 9), and functionally ( 10) analogous to the mammalian auditory cortical microcircuit. Songbirds are an important animal model for studying the sensorimotor mechanisms of vocal learning and the processing of learned, complex sound sequences ( 1– 4). These results challenge conventional views regarding the use of pitch cues in nonhuman auditory sequence recognition. Instead we show that melody recognition can generalize even in the absence of pitch, as long as the spectral shapes of the constituent tones are preserved. We find that small manipulations altering either pitch or timbre independently can drive melody recognition to chance, suggesting that both percepts are poor descriptors of the perceptual cues used by birds for this task. Here, we investigate melody recognition in a species of songbird, the European Starling ( Sturnus vulgaris), using tone sequences that vary in both pitch and timbre. This work relies almost exclusively on acoustically simple stimuli that may belie sensitivities to more complex spectral features. Decades of research have led to the widespread belief that songbirds, unlike humans, are strongly biased to use absolute pitch (AP) in melody recognition. Surprisingly, songbirds seem to lack this capacity, although they can learn to recognize human melodies and use complex acoustic sequences for communication. Humans easily recognize “transposed” musical melodies shifted up or down in log frequency.

Absolute pitch trainer serial