Singing Like A Canary

Word is that Saddam Hussein’s evil foreign minister Tariq Aziz has been singing "like a canary."

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This, of course, only raises the question: How do canaries sing?

The answer is more interesting than you might suppose. Turns out that male canaries (the kind that are noted for their song) have a very definite grammar to what they do.

EXCERPTS:

There’s a sort of universal grammar for canary songs, and canaries follow it strictly. First, songs consist of specific syllables, similar to the phonemes in human language. Canaries know 30 to 40 of these elementary units.

Second, when constructing a song, canaries repeat a syllable for one second before jumping quickly to a different note.

"It’s as though you have 26 letters of the alphabet and it’s as if the bird goes CCCCC, HHHHH, QQQQQ. They use 60 to 70 percent of their syllables per song," Tim Gardner of MIT told LiveScience.

Or, to put it another way, it’s as if male canaries go "So So So So So! Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa! Do Do Do Do Do! Mi Mi Mi Mi Mi!"

LISTEN TO A CANARY DO THIS (.wav file).

Turns out also that this is genetically hard-wired into canaries:

[A] canary born deaf, or raised alone in a soundproof box, will grow up to sing a normal adult song. Also, canary chicks beg for food with added gusto when a song specific to their species is played, even if they’ve never heard it before.

Now, normally male canaries learn their songs from their dads, but they can learn them from other males or even things that aren’t canaries. Just for fun, scientists raised canaries with computer-generated artifical songs.

The result? Young male canaries tried to imitate the artificial songs.

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They also played sounds for them that sounded like they came from video games, and once again the canaries imitated them.

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But then something happened: The young male canaries hit puberty. And sounding like an X-Box or the canary equivalent of Hal 9000 just wasn’t sexy enough for the young female canaries, and so the guys switched back to traditional canary song style right quick!

Actually, the story gives the impression they did that even before encountering females, with just the onset of marriageable age converting these young synthpop males into traditionalist canary folksingers:

The second surprise was that when the canaries reached adulthood, when they would woo females with their songs, the innate cues kicked in and they began singing traditional songs.

"As they entered adulthood, they entered a process of rearranging. They used computer syllables, but sang them with traditional canary syntax, repeating each one for one second," Gardner said.

The canaries may have sung with mixed strategies early on, but once they hit 6 to 8 months of age, the emphasis on traditional song structure drastically increased. In two cases, where the researchers induced adulthood by injecting the canary with testosterone, and setting the mood for mating by altering the length of day, the canaries changed their tune in as few as five days.

But, like many who have made the transition from rock to country, the canaries still liked pulling out their old records once in a while:

Even though they predominantly sang the traditional songs, every once and a while they would bust out with a computer inspired tune.

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