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Published January 24, 2023 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

1/f laws found in non-human music

Abstract

A compelling question at the intersection of physics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology concerns the extent to which the brains of various species evolved to encode regularities of the physical world. It would be parsimonious and adaptive, for example, for brains to evolve an innate understanding of gravity and the laws of motion, and to be able to detect, auditorily, those patterns of noises that ambulatory creatures make when moving about the world. One such physical regularity of the world is fractal structure, generally characterized by power-law correlations or 1/f β spectral distributions. Such laws are found broadly in nature and human artifacts, from noise in physical systems, to coastline topography (e.g., the Richardson effect), to neuronal spike patterns. These distributions have also been found to hold for the rhythm and power spectral density of a wide array of human music, suggesting that human music incorporates regularities of the physical world that our species evolved to recognize and produce. Here we show for the first time that 1/fβ laws also govern the spectral density of a wide range of animal vocalizations (music), from songbirds, to whales, to howling wolves. We discovered this 1/fβ power-law distribution in the vocalizations within all of the 17 diverse species examined. Our results demonstrate that such power laws are prevalent in the animal kingdom, evidence that their brains have evolved a sensitivity to them as an aid in processing sensory features of the natural world.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. We thank the Cornell Macaulay Library for the use of their recordings, as well as the individuals, listed in the Supporting Information, who made these recordings. ASJ acknowledges support from a Barry M. Goldwater scholarship and a Marshall scholarship, as well as the late Professor Tom Tombrello for the circumstances which led to this work. This work began when author DJL was the Lauritsen Visiting Lecturer in High Energy Physics at Caltech in the Division of Physics, Mathematics & Astronomy, and was supported in part by an NSERC grant to DJL. This work was also supported by the Center for Scientific Computing at UCSB and NSF Grant CNS-0960316 and NSF PHY-1748958. Contributions. A.S.J., D.J.S., and D.J.L. conceived of the study together and wrote the report. A.S.J. conducted the research and analysis with guidance from D.J.L. Data availabilty. The data that support the findings of this study were downloaded from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/) in the wave file format. The individual recordings are listed in Supplementary Information Table S1. The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplemental Material - 41598_2023_28444_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023