[HN Gopher] In birdsong, scientists find some parallels with hum...
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In birdsong, scientists find some parallels with human speech
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 80 points
Date : 2022-03-14 08:29 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| servytor wrote:
| I remember part of this book called "The Symbolic Species: The
| Co-evolution of Language and the Brain", and the author got so
| angry when layman compared birdsong to speech. It was a very
| interesting book though.
| geenew wrote:
| This episode of BBC Discovery from 2015 covered the topic and was
| quite interesting.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02rmjbd
| totetsu wrote:
| it's always fun to take a look at bird song recordings with
| Audacity spectrum view.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| https://www.windytan.com/2021/03/speech-to-birdsong-conversi...
| dang wrote:
| Discussed here:
|
| _Speech to Birdsong Conversion_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26626417 - March 2021 (27
| comments)
| sdenton4 wrote:
| By the way, we're running a Kaggle birdsong species id
| competition right now, for anyone who would like to try their
| hand:
|
| https://www.kaggle.com/c/birdclef-2022
|
| The focus this year is on few-shot learning for rare+endangered
| species classification.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Let's build a bird modem, and let them join Twitter!
|
| It would also be quite fun to make a user interface where a bird
| could "fly" through Google Street View, and sense the location
| changing based on an electromagnet instead of the magnetic north
| pole that they normally use for navigation.
|
| Since August 2021, I've been trying to apply UncleBob's advice to
| "clean as you go" (Scout Rule) and picking up litter while biking
| to work.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSaAMQVq01E&t=2021s
|
| The birds have been particularly friendly and thankful. Pigeons
| and Pukekos help pick up food from the ground. They're all
| surprisingly trusting (especially if I have some fish & chips to
| share). Seagulls look down, and shout about litter. Sparrows are
| smaller, faster, and have lower energy requirements, so eat
| smaller pieces of food.
|
| So while I'm going around looking to pick up biohazard waste
| (used masks in bushes), the birds are helping, and it would be so
| nice to let them chat to each other, even if we don't understand
| their QPSK or other encoding schemes. Parrots get so bored in
| cages, let's put them on the Internet :)
| jcims wrote:
| More of an artistic exploration but I think somehow still gets at
| a similar intuition in this context. Oona Raisanen (aka windytan)
| did a small write up and some code about how human speech limited
| to a single harmonic actually sounds a bit like birdsong.
|
| https://www.windytan.com/2021/03/speech-to-birdsong-conversi...
|
| YouTube video at the bottom provides an example. She also makes
| code available to duplicate.
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| The song of plain-tailed wrens is fascinating. Male and female
| birds perform a high-tempo duet where it's hard to tell it is two
| birds doing the singing.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3GprtBhekA
|
| (We discuss songbirds and the importance of sequence
| building/remembering for language in our recent book. Here's a
| review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ogi-
| ogas/journey-... )
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Any progress in establish whether the song is, in fact,
| language?
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| ML techniques are leading to some interesting work in
| determining this. Here's one such example https://journals.pl
| os.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... Female zebra
| finches do not sing, only males do. I'd imagine that if bird
| song is high on communication, it would be seen in both sexes
| (and there are song birds where females sing, but not studied
| as much as far as I know.) tldr: still unclear, but new
| techniques give us hope we can answer
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I wouldn't be so quick to write off birdsong as speech
| based on this one species--given the dramatic variability
| in form, behavior, and habitat across the animal kingdom, a
| particular family of birds where the males don't "talk"
| wouldn't surprise me at all.
| xoserr wrote:
| I remember walking early morning last summer, listening to
| the birds and thinking how absurd it is to believe this isn't
| a type of language.
|
| I guess it would depend on what is considered the minimum
| constraints to be considered a language.
| user-the-name wrote:
| https://www.windytan.com/2021/03/speech-to-birdsong-conversi...
| Samuslav wrote:
| I live with a Green Aracari, and I swear there's more than just
| signal in the noise. They make fast-paced series of rattles and
| chattering sounds, where different patterns of pitch have
| different meanings-- reminds me of the "tonemes" of tonal human
| language. But there are without a doubt sounds that map cleanly
| to certain meanings- one sound in particular means hawk or "sky
| problem" and I can replicate it and get the bird into lookout
| mode immediately. The species is known for cooperative hunting
| (nest raiding), so it wouldn't surprise me if they had at least
| some basic communication patterns approaching language.
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