Human music contains these rhythmic patterns, too.
In their 2020 study, Dr. Roeske and Dr. Tchernikovski compared recordings of thrush nightingales across Europe with examples from musical genres all over the world, including Western classical piano, Persian drumming and Tunisian stambeli. They found that birdsong and global music forms had the same types of timing components, integer ratios, which form the foundation of most melodies.
In music, these ratios are the amount of time between notes. A 1-to-1 ratio means notes are evenly spaced, like in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but a 1-to-2 ratio means the time from one note to the next is uneven, like in “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” Dr. Roeske explained.
When they charted integer ratios from birdsong and human music, the plots all produced a similar shape resembling a long-stemmed flower. This indicates that some birds build songs using patterns similar to those found in human music.
Other researchers are gaining insights by focusing on birdsong rhythm.
“We found that rhythm and syntax have a relationship that nobody has really thought about before,” said Jeffrey Xing, a graduate student in psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of a September 2022 paper analyzing the song structure of the Australian pied butcherbird.
Pied butcherbirds “seem to prefer some song rhythms over others,” such as isochronous rhythm, Mr. Xing said. In some ways, these rhythmic patterns follow rules like forms of poetry that have strict meter. A good example is a sonnet.
“It’s a very rigid rhythmic structure that you have to follow, and somehow the syntax of the words you use has to conform to that,” he said.
Marlowe Starling
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