Can birds imitate Artoo-Detoo?

The research summarized in an infographic (Dam et al., 2025).

When you think of birds imitating sounds, parrots and starlings might come to mind. They’re famous for copying human speech, car alarms, and even ringtone melodies. But what happens when you challenge them with something really complex, like the electronic beeps and boops of R2-D2, the beloved Star Wars droid? Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University put nine species of parrots and European starlings to the test.

Starlings versus parrots

It turns out that starlings had the upper hand when it came to mimicking the more complex 'multiphonic sounds. Thanks to the unique morphology of their vocal organ, the syrinx, which has two sound sources. This allows starlings to reproduce multiple tones at once—perfect for R2-D2-style chatter.

Parrots, on the other hand, are limited to producing one tone at a time (just like humans). Still, they held their own when it came to the simpler “monophonic” beeps of R2-D2. Interestingly, it weren’t the famously chatty African grey parrots or amazon parrots that did best, but the smaller species, like budgerigars and cockatiels. These little birds, often thought of as less impressive vocalists, actually outperformed the larger species in this specific task, likely by using different strategies to imitate sounds.

Even sounds from science fiction can teach us something real

The researchers call their study a fun but powerful window into how anatomy, like the structure of a bird’s vocal organ, can shape the limits and possibilities of their vocal skills. It is the first time that so many different species all produced the same complex sounds, which finally allows for a direct comparison. This shows that even sounds from science fiction can teach us something real about the evolution of communication and learning in animals.

And here’s the cool part: much of the sound data came from pet owners and bird lovers participating in citizen science through the Bird Singalong Project. With their help, the researchers were able to gather a richer, more diverse collection of bird sounds than ever before, proving that science doesn't always have to happen in a lab.

Reference

Dam, N.C.P., Honing, H. & M.J. Spierings (2025). What imitating an iconic robot reveals on allospecific vocal imitation in parrots and starlings. Scientific Reports, 15, 36816. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-23444-7

What is the use of the comparative approach in studying the origins of language and music?

Diagrammatic representation of the comparative
approach (as discussed in ten Cate & Honing, 2022/2025)

Comparative studies can be done in several ways. One approach is to examine the sounds made by animals and look for shared features or parallels with language or music. To study these, one can, for example, examine how the structure of a sequence of sounds compares to syntactic structures in language or rhythmic structures in music, or whether harmonic sounds are recognized by their pitch (like in music) or by their spectral structure (like in speech). The presence of such features can indicate that similar sensory or cognitive mechanisms may underlie their perception and production and those needed for language and music in humans. However, one needs to be cautious with drawing such conclusions. That a sound produced by an animal has certain features in common with language or music may be incidental and a result of human interpretation, rather than indicating shared mechanisms per se. Animal sounds showing, for example, a specific rhythmic pattern (e.g., in the call of the indri, a lemur species; De Gregorio et al., 2021) or that contain tones based on a harmonic series (e.g., in the hermit thrush; Doolittle et al., 2014), need not indicate an ability of the animal to perceive or produce rhythms or harmonic sounds in general, as is common in humans. To show this, it is necessary to demonstrate the perception or production of such patterns outside and beyond what is realized in the species-specific sound patterns. This requires a second approach: using controlled experiments to address whether animals can (learn to) distinguish and generalize artificially constructed sounds that differ in specific linguistic or musical features. The two approaches, observational-analytical and experimental, are complementary: the first one may hint at presence of a certain ability, while the second one can test its existence and the limits of the capacity (Adapted from: ten Cate & Honing, 2025).

De Gregorio, C., Valente, D., Raimondi, T., Torti, V., Miaretsoa, L., Friard, O., Giacoma, C., Ravignani, A. & Gamba, M. (2021). Categorical rhythms in a singing primate. Current Biology, 31(20), R1379–R1380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.032 

Doolittle, E. L., Gingras, B., Endres, D. M. & Fitch, W. T. (2014). Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11(46), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1406023111

Ten Cate, C. & & Honing, H. (2025). Precursors of Music and Language in Animals. Sammler, D. (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Language and Music Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894700.013.0026. Preprint: psyarxiv.com/4zxtr.

Musical Animals: Are We? Can There Be?

Lecture at Barenboim-Said Akademie in 2016.

Roughly ten years ago, I had the honor of being invited by the Barenboim-Said Akademie to deliver a public lecture in Berlin, Germany. The event, entitled Was Musik kann (What Music Can Do), celebrated the impact of music and musicianship on our lives. In my presentation I started with a listening experiment, in a playful attempt to challenge the audience. 

I invited the attendees—many of whom were professional musicians and distinguished educators at the Barenboim-Said Academy—to envision themselves as expert judges on a conservatory selection committee. They were asked to assess the musicianship of an ensemble based solely on a brief excerpt of a live recording I played for them. Emulating the traditional audition process, where candidates perform behind a curtain to ensure impartiality, I asked the audience to make their judgments based solely on what they heard. 

The audience's reaction was split; some were enthusiastic, while others were unimpressed. When asked for their thoughts, the positive responders praised the performance as experimental yet well-executed, whereas the negative ones criticized the timing as sloppy and the music as lacking melody. However, their opinions shifted dramatically after viewing a original video of the musicians: a group of Thai elephants, led by a human conductor, that were playing an array of percussion instruments and a mouth harmonica (see video registration). 

This example is not just amusing; it also highlights some pitfalls in the study of the biology of music. Although I influenced the audience by framing the test as an audition, their varied reactions reveal more about human perception than about the elephants’ musical abilities. This raises a fundamental question: what must an organism—whether human, elephant, or bird—perceive to experience something as music? For instance, while the songs of an Amazonian songbird may sound musical to us, this perception reflects our own biases. To truly understand a bird's sense of musicality, we must ask whether the bird hears its own song as music. This inquiry shifts the attention from studying the structure of music to studying the structure of musicality. 

Over the last two decades it has become evident that humans share a natural predisposition for music, akin to our inherent capacity for language (Hagoort, 2019). This predisposition, which I like to term musicality, encompasses a set of traits that develops spontaneously, is shaped by our cognitive abilities, as well being constrained by its underlying biology. Unlike music itself, which varies across cultures and societies, musicality refers to the cognitive and biological capacities that enable us to perceive and appreciate music, even among those who may not play an instrument or sing out of tune (Honing et al., 2015). 

The shift in the study of the origins of music, from studying the structural aspects of music to trying to understand the structure of our capacity for music, marks an important change in perspective in music research, as reflected in the titles of two foundational meetings and their resulting publications: The Origins of Music (Wallin et al., 2000) and, consequently, The Origins of Musicality (Honing, 2018b). While the cross-cultural study of the structure of music (melodic patterns, scales, tonality, etc.) has offered exciting insights (Mehr et al., 2019; Savage et al., 2015), the approach used in these studies is indirect: the object of study here is music—the result of musicality—rather than musicality itself. Hence it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the individual contributions of culture and biology. For example, it is not clear whether the division of an octave into small and unequal intervals in a particular musical culture results from a widespread theoretical doctrine or from a music perception ability or a biological constrained predisposition. 

All this is an important motivation to study the structure of musicality– i.e. the capacity for music–, its constituent components (see Table 1), and how these might be shared with other animals, aiming to disentangle the biological, cultural and environmental contributions to the human capacity for music. All these are topics that are elegantly addressed in the current volume. 

[This text is a fragment of a preliminary version of an introductory chapter of The Biology of Music (Ravignani, in press)]

Ravignani, A. (ed.) (in press) The Biology of Music: Interdisciplinary Insights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Interested in music and biology?

In this episode of Big Biology, entitled Beasty Beats: The Origins of Musicality, Art Woods and Marty Martin talk with Henkjan Honing about the biology of musicality:

"He started as a musician but eventually found his way to the science of music. Among diverse species, he and his collaborators now study how and why some animals perceive elements of music but others do not. We also discuss the earliest known examples of human musical instruments and the possible adaptive value of music."

Apple podcast here | Spotify podcast here | Stitcher podcast here.