Building the tiniest recording studios in Music City to understand vocal learning
1,148 views · Published 4 June 2018 · 1:00 · Indexed 26 September 2026
Channel: Vanderbilt University · 2018 · Education
Humans are not the only animals that can learn vocal communication from others, but it’s a pretty exclusive club—the only other members are songbirds, bats, whales, dolphins and elephants. At Vanderbilt University, biologists Nicole Creanza and Kate Snyder are studying vocal learning in zebra finches by building the tiniest recording studios in Music City. To study the birds’ learning process, Snyder built two dozen individual recording studios out of picnic coolers and sound foam and furnished them with everything a young bird fresh out of the nest needs, including their favorite toys, swings. The young birds bunk down with an adult male while the researchers collect every sound they make. “We can use a computational analysis to compare how well they learned and how quickly they learned over time through their entire development,” said Snyder, who is a Ph.D. candidate in Biological Sciences. “We can compare the similarity of their song to their tutor's song, and that gives us a quantitative way of measuring learning.” Follow Vanderbilt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanderbiltu, on Instagram: http://instagram.com/vanderbiltu and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vanderbilt. See all Vanderbilt social media at http://social.vanderbilt.edu.
