Musicality in Animal Songs

Projektbeschreibung

Genau auf die Musikalität verschiedener Arten hören

Die wissenschaftliche Erforschung der Ursprünge der menschlichen Musikalität bildet eine komplexe Aufgabe. Zwar wurde festgestellt, dass auch andere Lebewesen über Gesänge verfügen, mit denen sie Vokalisierungen erzeugen, doch lag der Schwerpunkt dieser Forschung auf Vögeln. Das Team des innerhalb der Marie-Skłodowska-Curie-Maßnahmen unterstützten Programms MAS füllt eine Wissenslücke in Bezug auf die Ursprünge der Musik. Es erkundet die musikalische Struktur in den Gesängen von Buckelwalen und Gibbons, die weitläufig verwandte Säugetiere mit stark strukturierten Vokalisierungen sind. Mithilfe von Verfahren des maschinellen Lernens werden im Rahmen des Projekts Tonhöhenstruktur und Ausdruckskraft untersucht, wobei diese Gesänge mit der Musik der Menschen verglichen werden, um besser zu verstehen, wie sich die Musikalität über verschiedene Arten hinweg entwickelt haben könnte.

Ziel

Musicality can be defined as the biological and cognitive abilities necessary to appreciate and create music, which makes song production a significant marker of the trait in the human species. In analogy, some acoustic behaviours of other species, whether birds, whales or primates, have also been traditionally termed songs. However, to date the relatively few studies of parallels between human and animal songs have focused mainly on bird songs. Broader cross-species comparison of animal songs would contribute to addressing the evolutionary origins of music, by disentangling the role of phylogeny and behavioural traits hypothesised to underlie musicality in humans.
Two exemplary mammalian singers are humpback whales and gibbons. Their tonal and patterned vocal sequences are traditionally termed songs, but features of musicality have not yet been rigorously assessed. Such an observation would provide critical insights, as these two species possess proposed fundamental traits of musicality (they both have harmonically rich vocalisations, humpback whales are vocal learners and gibbons sing in duets), and they lie at very distinct branches of the mammalian phylogenetic tree. This research will thus test the existence of musical features in humpback whale and gibbon songs.
Tests for the presence of overtone-based pitch selection (i.e. frequency intervals corresponding to small-integer proportions drawn from the harmonic series) and expressiveness (i.e. the oscillation between repetition and variation found in human music) have been successful in bird songs. Systematic measurements for these two features will be conducted in passive acoustic recordings of wild singing humpback whales and gibbons, for their songs to be compared with human music. This search will benefit from machine learning based vocalisation detection, classification and similarity measurements, as well as sub-unit segmentation, allowing a systematic analysis of musicality, robust against both signals