Silent Spring

Tree trimmers working for the City of Los Angeles thinned seven trees behind the Ralphs grocery store this spring. It took a few days and was quite the production. I figure because the store was upgrading to a Whole Foods, that was the reason for the street grooming. After the tree trimmers were done and gone, I noticed, while walking my dogs under a set of newly trimmed trees so vast they have buckled the sidewalk, that the space was eerily silent. Those trees had never been so silent. They’d always been full of birdsong. Not that I had noted it before the birds were gone. Springtime is not the time of year to trim trees. October and November are the best time of the year for this. But LA is vast and not progressive when it comes to city maintenance. But I digress.

Missing the birdsong made me wonder if hearing the sound of birds singing might contribute to creativity. Might the songs affect human activity. Because now that I missed it, I felt empty walking under those trees. I also wondered if birdsong might affect plants, geography, and more…

Doing very little digging I came across two areas of study I found interesting.

First is the Birdsong Project: This is a link to the project’s facebook page, itself an interesting read.

The Birdsong Project explores the question “What are the psychological benefits of listening to birdsong?” It is a collaborative PhD project of Dr. Eleanor Ratcliff with University Of Surrey, National Trust, & Surrey Wildlife Trust.

The archived study (pdf) is here.

An abstract of the study’s abstract:

Natural environments, and particularly visual stimuli in nature, are usually perceived as restorative following stress and attention fatigue. Studies extending these findings to auditory natural stimuli have used soundscapes comprising multiple types of sound. Birdsong recurs as a type of sound used in such studies, but little is known about restorative perceptions of bird sounds on their own and how these may relate to existing theories of environmental restoration. Via semi-structured interviews with twenty adult participants, bird songs and calls were found to be the type of natural sound most commonly associated with perceived stress recovery and attention restoration. However, not all bird sounds were regarded as helpful for such processes.

So, while not being scientific, I could have made the same conclusion. It’s great to know someone is on it.

Second is an interesting PBS article about “What Birdsong Can Teach Us About Creativity” by Allison Eck. The article is about scientific studies on how different birds learn a new song (through a series of mastering one step at a time through repetition before learning the next step), what kind of memory different bird species have, and how memory/brain capacity affects their ability to change up their song(s). And are those “low-probability sequences” (unusual change ups to a birdsong) a result of creative cognitive decision making or a biological response. Is it artistic or an accident.

I found this interesting to know scientists are contemplating these things. Who knew?

The article dove into “R” rated territory, relating “sexy-syllables” and “solicitous displays” to birdsong. You should read the article, it’s quite interesting and much too long to swipe and paste here.

Allison Eck continues her article with a bit on Channeling Our Inner Bird: “Even if songbird’s flourishes ultimately have no discernable purpose, they are still helping scientists to pin down the role of variability in the learning process.” It seems there are similarities between the way humans and birds learn. Studying finches, scientists have learned they go through a recovery period when they first wake up. Plenty of sleep can shorten this and produce more elaborate songs at the end of this period. Whereas a lack of sleep slows down the recovery period and negatively impacts the quality of the bird’s singing performance. After sleeping a finch’s brain is more elastic and receptive to experimentation. As the day progresses, a finch’s brain wiring tightens and their songs “snap into place”. The scientists “found that the birds who oscillate this way–more structure, less structure, more structure–learn better.”

Allison Eck almost concludes her article with this note “Like humans, birds seem to put a bit of personality into each performance. And that, scientists are discovering, requires some intelligence.”

Smart Bird.