Mockingbird Morphing Music: Structured Transitions in a Complex Bird Song

The song of the northern mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos, is notable for its extensive length and inclusion of numerous imitations of several common North American bird species. Because of its complexity, it is not widely studied by birdsong scientists. When they do study it, the specific imitations are often noted, and the total number of varying phrases. What is rarely noted is the systematic way the bird changes from one syllable to the next, often with a subtle transition where one sound is gradually transformed into a related sound, revealing an audible and specific compositional mode. It resembles a common strategy in human composing, which can be described as variation of a theme. In this paper, we present our initial attempts to describe the specific compositional rules behind the mockingbird song, focusing on the way the bird transitions from one syllable type to the next. We find that more often than chance, syllables before and after the transition are spectrally related, i.e., transitions are gradual, which we describe as morphing. In our paper, we categorize four common modes of morphing: timbre change, pitch change, squeeze (shortening in time), and stretch (lengthening in time). This is the first time such transition rules in any complex birdsong have been specifically articulated.

Probability and distribution patterns of vowel phonemes in the Oroqen language of the PRC: comparative study

The paper analyzes the probability and distribution patterns of vowels in the Oroqen language of the PRC. Six frequency parameters were taken for analysis: 1) syllable types, 2) word form length, 3) consonant and vowel load, 4) long vs short vowels, 5) hard vs soft vowels, 6) labial vs non-labial vowels. Studying syllable type (V, VC, CV, CVC) and the word form length revealed the following discoveries. First, CV-type turned out the most frequent in Oroqen, ac-counting for 47,64 % of all syllables found in the material. Second, disyllabic and trisyllabic words prevailed, accounting for 75,7 % compared to 64,8 % in Evenki and 85,5 % in Kumandin. Additionally, the consonant load vs vowel load was calculated. It was found that in Oroqen, the consonant-vowel proportion (1,5/1) was similar to Evenki and Mansi, a little higher than in Turkic languages, and a little lower than in Khanty. However, this difference proved statistically insignificant. Another finding was that short vowels significantly pre-vailed over long ones, accounting for 68,52–93,11 % of all vowels used. The hard vowels ac-counted for 24,52–46,41 %, neutral ones – 26,8–44,86 %, only slightly exceeding soft vowels in frequency load (17,13–43,51%) of all vowels used. Non-labial vowels proved to be more frequent (65,76–91,78 %) than labial ones (8,22–34,24 %). In general, the results show a high similarity of Oroqen to the Turkic and Ob-Ugric languages with regard to parameters 4 and 6. At the same time, the difference was found with regard to parameters 1–3 and 5.

Do penguins’ vocal sequences conform to linguistic laws?

Information compression is a general principle of human language: the most frequent words are shorter in length (Zipf's Law of Brevity) and the duration of constituents decreases as the size of the linguistic construct increases (Menzerath–Altmann Law). Vocal sequences of non-human primates have been shown to conform to both these laws, suggesting information compression might be a more general principle. Here, we investigated whether display songs of the African penguin, which mediate recognition, intersexual mate choice and territorial defence, conform with these laws. Display songs are long, loud sequences combining three types of syllables. We found that the shortest type of syllable was the most frequent (with the shortest syllable being repeated stereotypically, potentially favouring signal redundancy in crowded environments). We also found that the average duration of the song's constituents was negatively correlated with the size of the song (a consequence of increasing the relative number of the shortest syllable type, rather than reducing the duration across all syllable types, thus preserving the communication of size-related information in the duration of the longest syllable type). Our results provide the first evidence for conformity to Zipf's and Menzerath–Altmann Laws in the vocal sequences of a non-primate species, indicating that these laws can coexist with selection pressures specific to the species' ecology.

High Level Speaker Specific Features as an Efficiency Enhancing Parameters in Speaker Recognition System

<p>In this paper, I present high-level speaker specific feature extraction considering intonation, linguistics rhythm, linguistics stress, prosodic features directly from speech signals. I assume that the rhythm is related to language units such as syllables and appears as changes in measurable parameters such as fundamental frequency ( ), duration, and energy. In this work, the syllable type features are selected as the basic unit for expressing the prosodic features. The approximate segmentation of continuous speech to syllable units is achieved by automatically locating the vowel starting point. The knowledge of high-level speaker’s specific speakers is used as a reference for extracting the prosodic features of the speech signal. High-level speaker-specific features extracted using this method may be useful in applications such as speaker recognition where explicit phoneme/syllable boundaries are not readily available. The efficiency of the particular characteristics of the specific features used for automatic speaker recognition was evaluated on TIMIT and HTIMIT corpora initially sampled in the TIMIT at 16 kHz to 8 kHz. In summary, the experiment, the basic discriminating system, and the HMM system are formed on TIMIT corpus with a set of 48 phonemes. Proposed ASR system shows 1.99%, 2.10%, 2.16% and 2.19 % of efficiency improvements compared to traditional ASR system for and of 16KHz TIMIT utterances.</p>

Urban background noise affects breeding song frequency and syllable-type composition in the Northern Mockingbird

The Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) is a successful urban adaptor known to display flexibility in foraging, nesting, and anti-predator behavior. Its vocal behavior is also complex, with a breeding song composed of a wide variety of non-mimetic and mimetic elements, or “syllable types.” We tested the hypothesis that Northern Mockingbird adaptation to urban settings includes changes in its vocal behavior in noisy urban environments. We studied an urban/suburban mockingbird population to test the effect of urban background noise on breeding song frequency and syllable-type composition. Given that urban noise overlaps most strongly with low-frequency vocalizations, a phenomenon known as “signal masking,” we predicted a positive association between noise levels and mockingbird average peak frequency (a measure of vocalization power). We further predicted a positive effect of noise levels on the peak frequency of the lowest-pitched syllable type in a mockingbird’s song, no effect on the peak frequency of the highest-pitched syllable type, and thus a negative effect on mockingbird peak frequency range. Lastly, we predicted a negative effect of background noise on the use of syllable types experiencing heavy signal masking and, conversely, a positive effect on the use of syllable types experiencing minimal signal masking. We found a significant positive effect of noise levels on both average peak frequency and peak frequency of the lowest-pitched syllable type, but no effect on the peak frequency of the highest-pitched syllable type and peak frequency range. In addition, as background noise levels increased, we found significant declines in the percentages of heavily masked syllable types (1–3 kHz) and significant increases in the percentages of syllable types in the 3–5 kHz range; percentages of syllable types >5 kHz were, however, unaffected by background noise. These results were consistent with the hypothesis that Northern Mockingbird breeding songs change in pitch and syllable-type composition in noisy settings, providing further evidence that songs of urban-adapting species differ in noisy environments.

A/B Type segregation in mixed-onset phonetic series is the key to early Chinese onset complexity

There is still little agreement regarding the most important evidence for Old Chinese (OC) onset complexity—Middle Chinese (MC) mixed-onset phonetic series. This study explores a remarkable feature of this evidence first noticed by Sagart (1999). Within series such as those involving mixture of MC labials and velars with l-, x- with m-, velars with hj- (/y/), and d- with y- (/j/), MC onset and so-called A/B (syllable) Type fail to vary independently of one another. An unrecognized but inescapable implication of this association is that these MC onset results and A/B Type require a unified explanation in early Chinese. In light of the phonetic series material, I demonstrate that pre-OC Type involved two contrasting onset configurations. A number of phonetic specifications are conceivable; here, based on ideas of Ferlus (1998), I show how the data can be explained in terms of an early contrast between minor syllable forms **CǝR- (“Type A”) and tautosyllabic clusters **CR- (“Type B”) where R is a sonorant.

Arabic stress in strict CV, with no moras, no syllables, no feet and no extrametricality

This paper continues the effort that began in (Scheer, Tobias & Peter Szigetvari. 2005. Unified representations for stress and the syllable. Phonology 22(1). 37–75.) to present a compelling alternative to moraic accounts of stress systems, framed in the theory of Strict CV (Lowenstamm, Jean. 1996. CV as the only syllable type. In Jacques Durand & Bernard Laks (eds.), Current trends in phonology models and methods, 419–442. European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford.). We have chosen stress in Palestinian Arabic, a stronghold of moraic theory, to be the empirical basis of the paper. It is a complex system, involving syllable structure and stress assignment, quantity sensitivity and syllabically-determined stress shift. Moreover, its analysis requires the deployment of a great deal of the theoretical machinery that has been (independently) developed in moraic stress theory. These phenomena, although recurrent cross-linguistically, remained outside the scope of Scheer and Szigetvari’s work. The present paper provides an account of these patterns using the innovative grid-based notion of weight incorporation (Ulfsbjorninn, Shanti. 2014. A Field Theory of Stress: the role of empty nuclei in stress systems. SOAS – University of London, PhD Dissertation.). The analysis is also brought to bear on Cairene Arabic, which is shown to differ from Palestinian in a single parameter setting. Significant independent support is provided by the extension of the analysis to the phenomenon of vowel shortening (both metrical and final), whose distribution and motivation are shown to follow in a straightforward manner from the general account. The paper also improves on previous analyses of meter in Strict CV, as for the first time in Strict CV metrics, a computational component is explicitly formalized. We conclude with a comparison to a moraic analysis of the phenomena discussed, and argue on principled grounds that the Strict CV account is a worthy competitor to such an analysis. Like its predecessor from 2005, the present account recognizes only one unit relevant for meter: the nucleus. No appeal is made to moras, syllables, feet or extrametricality.

AN ANALYSIS ON ENGLISH SYLLABLE STRESS PLACEMENTS OF THE ENGLISH STUDY PROGRAM STUDENTS

This research concerned with the student’s knowledge on the English syllable stress placements of English Education Study Program Students. This research was a descriptive quantitative research. In this research, a test of English syllable placements was used. The words used in the test items were taken from high frequency of word which consist of 10 questions for each English syllable type. The results of this research shows that the knowledge of the English Education Study Program students on English syllable stress placements was low with 39.3 of the total mean score . Futher more, comparison of the test result among three enrollments of samples shows that the different mean score of the second and fourth semester students was not significant (0.6 points); while the different mean scores of the second and fourth semester with sixth semester students was significant (20 points)