Human music also contains such rhythmic patterns.

In a 2020 study, Dr. Roske and Dr. Chernikovsky compared recordings of Thrush Nightingale from across Europe with examples from musical genres around the world, including Western classical piano, Persian drums, and Tunisia’s Stanberg. They found that bird calls and global musical forms have the same kind of timing elements that form the basis of most melodies: integer ratios.

In music, these ratios describe the length of time between notes. A 1:1 ratio means evenly spaced notes, like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but a 1:2 ratio means that certain notes are evenly spaced, like “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” to the next note with unequal time. explained Dr. Rothke.

Graphing integer ratios from bird calls and human music, all plots produced similar shapes resembling long-stemmed flowers. This indicates that some birds construct their songs using patterns similar to those found in human music.

Some researchers have focused on the rhythms of birdsong for insights.

“It turns out there is a relationship between rhythm and syntax that no one has ever thought of before,” he said. Jeffrey SinghHe is a graduate student in psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of the September 2022 paper analyzing the vocal structure of the Australian corbicula.

Flying birds “seem to prefer certain song rhythms over others,” such as isochronous rhythms, Singh said. In some ways, these rhythmic patterns follow the same rules as poetic forms with strict time signatures. A good example is the sonnet.

“It’s a very strict rhythmic structure that you have to follow, and the syntax of the words you use has to follow that in some way,” he said.