Research by Catalan and German scientists revealed: argentine parrotA species that invades the parks and gardens of Spanish cities. Has a different ‘voice’ for each individual. It is the first animal other than humans in which this phenomenon has been discovered. Specifically, these birds vocalize so that members of their flock can recognize them as individuals.
Conures and parrots are extraordinary talkers. They can learn new sounds throughout their lives, accumulating an almost unlimited repertoire of sounds. And also, They make calls so that flock members can identify them individually.This led a group of experts to investigate how it was possible for these animals to identify these sounds individually.
A study of Argentine parrots conducted by the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior and the Museu de Ciègency Naturals in Barcelona may answer this question: Individuals have a unique vocal timbre, known as a vocal tract, similar to humans. This finding in a wild parrot raises the possibility that other vocally flexible species, such as dolphins and bats, also have their own vocal signature..
“It makes sense that Argentinian parrots have an underlying vocal signature,” says Max Planck’s Simeon Smeele, first author of the paper published in Royal Society Open Science. “This is a solution for a bird that changes its song dynamically but needs to be recognized in a very noisy flock.”
Humans have complex and flexible vocal repertoires, but we can only recognize ourselves through our voices. The reason for this is Humans have voice signatures: Our vocal tracts leave a unique signature in our tone of voice in everything we say.
To date, there is little evidence that animals have unique signatures that underlie all calls made by an individual.
Other social animals also use vocal signals for recognition. In birds, bats, and dolphins, for example, individuals have a unique “characteristic call” that makes them recognizable to group members. Signature calls, however, encode identity into a single call type. To date, there is virtually no evidence that animals have unique signatures underlying all calls made by an individual. In other words, Almost no animal has a sound signature.
This surprised Smeele, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behaviour, who studies how parrots use their extraordinary vocal abilities to socialize in large groups. Just like people, Parrots use their tongues and mouths to modulate callsthat is, “their growls and screams sound much more human than the clear whistle of a songbird,” he says.
Additionally, parrots live in large groups with liquid limbs like humans. “There may be dozens of birds making sounds at the same time,” he says. “They need a way to know which individual is making which sound.”
Studies in Barcelona
In addition to the need to navigate complex social lives, Smeele wondered whether parrots with the right anatomy could also develop vocal tracts. To learn Traveled to Barcelona, where the largest population of individually tagged parrots in the wild is found. These birds are invasive and roam city parks in flocks of hundreds.
A monitoring program run by the Museu de Ciègency Naturals de Barcelona has been tagging parrots for 20 years and has so far 3,000 birds identified one by oneIt is a great help to Smeele and his work on individual speech recognition.
Armed with shotgun microphones, Smeele and his colleagues recorded hundreds of people’s calls, collecting more than 5,000 sounds in total; making this the largest study to date to individually mark individual wild parrots. More importantly, Smeele re-recorded the same individuals for two years and revealed how stable the calls were over time.
The scientists used a series of models to determine how recognizable individuals were in each of the five main types of calls this species makes.
They then used a series of models to determine how recognizable individuals were in each of the five main types of calls this species makes. Surprisingly, they found large differences in the so-called “contact call” sound that the birds use to communicate their identity. This overturned the long-held assumption that contact calls involve a fixed individual signal and suggested that parrots use something else for individual recognition.
Using the automatic voice model
For test if audio recordings are included in all thisSmeele appealed. Machine learning model, which is widely used in human voice recognition, This identifies the speaker using tone of voice. They trained the model to recognize individual parrot calls that are classified as “tonal” in sound.
Once the model is trained on an individual, Tested to see if the model can detect the same person from a different search group vocally they were classified as “growls”. The model performed this detection three times better than expected; Argentinian parrots have vocal signaturesSmeele, he said, “can enable individuals to get to know each other no matter what they say.”
“Argentinian budgies have a vocal signature, which Smeele said could “allow individuals to recognize each other no matter what they say.”
The authors caution that the evidence is still preliminary. “Before we can talk about a real vocal signature, we need to verify that the model can replicate this result when trained with more data from more individuals, and that birds can also recognize this timbre in vocalizations,” says Smeele.
The Barcelona team will complement future experiments and analysis with an ecological study, attaching GPS devices to the animals to determine how many individuals overlap in their roaming areas.
“This could provide information about the extraordinary ability of the species to distinguish calls from different individuals,” says Juan Carlos Senar of the Museu de Ciègency Naturals de Barcelona.
If Argentine conures turn out to have a real vocal signature, Smeele says it would provide an answer to the question of how parrots can be so flexible and social at the same time. These results will extend beyond parrots: “I hope this finding stimulates further study.” Discover vocal signatures in other social animals “This means that dolphins and bats can change their sounds flexibly.”
Reference work: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230835
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