I think it really started with "Dido's Lament," a song from the opera "Dido and Aeneas." As you may know, this is not a happy song. Well, Chris loved it, he wanted to learn it through and through, he played it all the time...All. The. Time. That would have been bad enough, considering how much of a downer songs about heartbreak induced suicide can be. But worse yet, instead of playing the song through, from start to finish, accompanied by vocals, he would play one chord over and over and over, skip to the end, finish at the beginning. Chris stopped performing when he played, Chris was practicing, Chris was exploring...
I know what you are thinking at this point, you are wondering: Is Chris a male songbird? Well, he's not, but I understand how you could get confused. Male songbirds sing to woo lady songbirds, and since they learn the songs they sing, they need to practice, and to hear themselves sing in order to keep their songs hot. In some species of songbirds, males reserve for females special, more consistently performed songs, called directed songs. Females swoon for these directed songs. However, when males aren't in close contact with and actively courting females, they'll sing another type of song, called undirected song, which is more variable and inconsistent. Some researchers think that undirected song is used for vocal practice and exploration.
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| Example spectrograms of directed song (top) and undirected song (bottom) in Zebra Finch (from Jarvis et al. 1998) |
Given Chris' predilectioned for performance level love ballads early in our relationship, when he was actively trying to win my heart, which only later transformed into noise-art style renditions of Dido's Lament, I see how you could confuse Chris with a male songbird, I know I often do.
How do birds switch from undirected to directed song when put in the presence of a female? Well it seems it has a lot to do with firing patterns and neural activity in parts of the songbird brain that control song. These brain areas are more active during undirected song, their activity is more regulated during directed song.
Scientists still don't completely understand how the songbird brain regulates directed vs. undirected singing, and it is even less clear how the human brain regulates singing. However, there is some evidence that different types of singing activate different regions of the human brain. So, even though Chris is clearly not a male songbird, and even though singing evolved separately in birds and humans, the similarities between the two types of vocal communication are quite interesting, and point to common selection pressures to communicate effectively across a diversity of environments and situations.
