Testing meter, rhythm, and tempo discriminations in pigeons
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Testing meter, rhythm, and tempo discriminations in pigeons
The production and appreciation of music is virtually a defining characteristic of our species. Because of this, interest in understanding the evolution and function of music and its constituent components has recently increased (Hauser and McDermott, 2003, McDermott and Hauser, 2005, Patel, 2008, Wallin et al., 2000). Correspondingly, the comparative examination of music has grown in an attempt to help address such issues. For instance, there are several demonstrations that various human music
Experiment 1 – meter discrimination
Experiment 1 tested pigeons on their capacity to process different meters. Meters are rhythmic patterns that derive from the series of strong accented and weak unaccented beats relative to the main pulse of a rhythm. These accents can come in the form of differences in loudness or timbre and are critical to the cognitive organization of music in humans (Clarke, 1987, Keller and Repp, 2005, Parncutt, 1994). Duple (4/4 or common time) and triple (3/4 or waltz time) meters are common examples in
Animals
Four experimentally naïve male White Carneaux pigeons (Columba livia; obtained from Palmetto Pigeon Plant, Sumter, SC) were tested. The birds were maintained at 80–85% of their free-feeding weight during testing with free access to water and grit. They were housed in a colony room with a 12:12-h light–dark cycle.
Apparatus
Testing was conducted in a flat black Plexiglas-paneled operant chamber (15.5″ wide × 16.5″ high × 14″ deep) contained within a sound-dampening chamber made of homasote soundboard lined
Experiment 2 – extensions
The main goal of Experiment 2 was to create and test a generalized meter discrimination. Such a discrimination would help to better discern the relative contributions of rhythmic grouping, timing, and counting in the discrimination established during the latter portions of Experiment 1. Towards this goal, Experiment 2 involved several different manipulations.
The first part of the experiment expanded the number of stimuli tested with the 8/4 and 3/4 meters. Showing that different types of
Animals and apparatus
The same pigeons and apparatus were used as in the previous experiment.
Phase 1
This phase reintroduced the KS stimuli using the 8/4 and 3/4 meters. Each session consisted of 96 randomly ordered trials (24 CT8+/24 CT3− and 24 KS8+/24 KS3−) tested at a tempo of 180 bpm. Two probe trials for each stimulus set were tested during each session. Other aspects of the trial organization were the same as at the end of Experiment 1. Twenty sessions using this organization were conducted.
Phase 2
In Phase 2 the pigeons
Experiment 3 – rhythmic vs. arrhythmic discrimination
At this point, we decided to try a different approach to investigating their appreciation of rhythm. Another critical component of rhythm discrimination is determining whether the interval between two beats is periodic or not. In this next experiment we examined the role of beat isochronicity in the perception of rhythmic structure by pigeons. Again, little animal research on this aspect of rhythm has been conducted (Fay, 1994, Hulse et al., 1984). Hulse et al. (1984) have found that starlings
Animals and apparatus
The same pigeons and apparatus were used as in Experiments 1 and 2.
Procedure
The pigeons were required to discriminate rhythmic and arrhythmic patterns during each session. Each trial used one of the four drum sounds (C, T, K, and S) that were previously used in Experiments 1 and 2. After a peck to the ready signal, each sound presentation lasted 20 s. The isochronous rhythmic pattern was the S+ condition for all pigeons and reinforced on a VI-10 schedule. They were also given 2-s response-independent
Experiment 4 – tempo discrimination
Given the outcomes of the three previous experiments, we decided in the fourth experiment to try yet a simpler form of rhythmic discrimination. Because it is fundamental to rhythm, tempo has been considered an auditory primitive (Hulse et al., 1992). Within the limited literature on rhythmic discrimination in animals, it appears that tempo discriminations are relatively robust over a variety of species and procedures (Hulse and Kline, 1993, McDermott and Hauser, 2007, Schneider and Lickliter,
Animals and apparatus
The same pigeons and apparatus were used as in the previous experiments.
Training
The pigeons were tested with 20 s presentations of repeating auditory stimuli presented at either 120 bpm (S+) or 30 bpm (S−). The repeating stimulus was a low C (130.81 Hz) synthetic piano sound (Garageband, Apple Computer, Inc; Cupertino, California). For the 30 bpm condition the duration of the note was 2 s, while for the 120 bpm condition it was 0.5 s in duration. Following their initial attacks, sound intensity diminished
General discussion
These experiments tested pigeons with various forms of rhythmic discriminations. Overall, the pigeons appear to be capable of learning rhythmic discriminations that relied on relative timing or tempo of the periodic stimuli. Beyond that, they seem to have more difficulties in learning other forms of rhythmic discriminations. The pigeons failed to learn a generalized discrimination between rhythmic and arrhythmic patterns of sounds involving different tempos. Although not easily learned, under
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Grant #0718804 from the National Science Foundation. The authors thank Ani Patel for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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2022, Applied Animal Behaviour ScienceCategorical Auditory Working Memory in Crows
2020, iScienceCitation Excerpt :Vocal learners, in particular, rely on acute audition and are known to perceive sounds in a categorical way (Dooling et al., 1995; Burgering et al., 2019). Even pigeons, non-songbirds with an unlearned vocal repertoire, are able to make same/different discriminations across a wide variety of auditory stimuli (Murphy and Cook, 2008; Cook and Brooks, 2009; Cook et al., 2016) and can learn to discriminate among music-derived acoustic elements and sequences (Brooks and Cook, 2010; Hagmann and Cook, 2010; Brooks and Cook, 2010; Cook, 2017). However, previous experiments did not require the birds to flexibly switch between auditory categories or remember auditory categories in working memory.
Rules, rhythm and grouping: auditory pattern perception by birds
2019, Animal BehaviourCitation Excerpt :However, the evidence for other bird species, tested in a more systematic way on their abilities to discriminate different pulse patterns and to maintain discrimination over tempo changes, is mixed (reviewed by ten Cate et al., 2016). Pigeons, for instance, could not be trained to discriminate an isochronous series of pulses from a heterochronous series of pulses, and showed only a limited ability to maintain the discrimination between two different pulse patterns over tempo changes (Hagmann & Cook, 2010). They were most likely attending to the absolute intervals between pulses rather than the overall metric or regular structure of the sound strings (Hagmann & Cook, 2010).
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2018, Trends in Cognitive SciencesCitation Excerpt :Turning to meter, basic perceptual grouping has been observed in multiple animal species, for example, rats, pigeons, zebra finches, and budgerigars. These animals could be trained to rely on alternations of intensity, duration, or pitch to segment an incoming signal into binary sets [95–99]. Crucially, however, no animal has yet been shown to perceive true musical meter, interpreted as hierarchical perceptual grouping of an isochronous sound stream.