Human speech and birdsong share universal acoustic patterns

Researchers Logan, Jon, and Kendra compared the vocal patterns of 367 bird species with 52 human languages to identify shared acoustic structures.

The team analyzed more than 70,000 birdsong syllables to see how different species organize their sounds. They found that both humans and birds tend to end their phrases with longer syllables and arrange their sounds to minimize pitch changes between adjacent syllables. Both groups also produce their vocalizations with regular and predictable rhythms.

In some instances, birdsong resembled human song, while in other cases, it more closely mirrored human speech. The study looked at whether the ability to learn vocalizations from others shaped these patterns. While humans, songbirds, and hummingbirds are all vocal learners, the researchers found that the degree of variation across different bird species did not appear to be related to vocal learning. This suggests that the similarities are not necessarily caused by the way these species learn their sounds.

The researchers suggest that physical constraints might drive these shared patterns. They propose that the need to coordinate breathing with the muscles that control the vocal tract could produce similar acoustic patterns in both birds and humans. Because songbirds evolved about 50 million years ago, these patterns have existed long before the evolution of modern humans.