Authors
Anna N Osiecka, Javier Oñate-Casado, Tereza Petrusková, Adrián Barrero, Václav Beran, Tereza Kubíková, Cristian Pérez-Granados, Michal Porteš, Juan Traba, Adam Petrusek, Lara S Burchardt
Published in
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Volume 1565. Issue 1.
Abstract
Animal rhythms are gaining increasing attention in the studies of behavior and musicology. Recently, it has been shown that rhythm itself can be used as an information coding channel. Now we ask: Does this hold true for arrhythmic sequences? To answer that, we analyzed songs of the tawny pipit (Anthus campestris), a migratory songbird known for its simple, arrhythmic songs. From focal recordings of 341 males across 6 European populations, we extracted an extensive set of rhythmic and temporal indices. We show that despite their apparent randomness, tawny pipit songs carry individual signatures-modern rhythmic indices such as beat precision and integer ratios proved among the most individually distinct parameters. Strikingly, we also uncover population-specific temporal patterns across the species' European range that have not been revealed by conventional spectral analyses. This study is the first to demonstrate geographic scale differences in birdsong rhythm, and to show that rhythmic analysis can provide useful descriptions of arrhythmic sequences.
PMID:
43023834
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 13 Nov 2026.
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