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Bird Songs and Bird Chirps

Yes, we have no bird chirps

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To be useful, the elements of an acoustical cyber alphabet should be short, complex,easily modifiable, and be suited for the human ear. Bird songs songs seem to meet all these requirlemnts. There are several ways to make a bird chirp alphabet. One, pieces of a bird song can be used to make a chirp. Two, short chirps can be used. Three, the chirps can be electronically modified, for example the frequency can be changed. The bird uterances offer a huge treasure trove from which to pick.

If bird songs are your interet, I encourage you to develop chirp alphabets. I would be glad to host several alphabets or provide link to you'r web site.

The ultimate goal is to develop expressive alphabets, microcomputer systems, the software, the information theory, and the fascinating research on how fast can acoustics communicate. Here in this effort we are not restricedt to just the sounds the human mouth can make.

Below is some interesting information about bird songs:

"Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. Though nonhuman primates can learn how to use innate vocalizations in new ways, they don't show a similar ability to learn new calls. Interestingly, a small number of more distant mammal species, including dolphins and bats, do have this capacity. But among the scattering of nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of the bush of life, the most impressive are birds - hands (wings?) down.

"Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics and syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.

"These parallels have motivated an explosion of research in recent decades, says ethologist Julia Hyland Bruno of Columbia University, who studies social aspects of song learning in zebra finches. "Lots of people have made analogies between language and birdsong," she says. "Hyland Bruno studies zebra finches because they are more social than most migratory birds - they like to travel in small bands that occasionally gather into larger groups. "I’m" interested in how it is that they learn their culturally transmitted vocalizations in these groups,"" says Hyland Bruno, coauthor of a paper in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics comparing birdsong learning and culture with human language.

"Both birdsong and language are passed culturally to later generations through vocal learning. Geographically distant populations of the same bird species can make small tweaks to their songs over time, eventually resulting in a new dialect - a process similar in some ways to how humans develop different accents, dialects and languages."

From: https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2022/do-birds-have-language#:~:text=Birds%20learn%20song%20in%20a,links%20between %20brain%20and%20behavior.




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