Saturday, April 20, 2024

Birds sing in their sleep – and now we can synthesize their songs

Amazing stuff!

I wish I could sing while I sleep (my wake time singing is probably not great). Maybe a star would be born overnight! (just kidding) What would be the lyrics: "I'm singing in my sleep/Just singin' in my sleep/What a glorious feeling/I'm happy again/I'm laughing at clouds/So dark up above/ The sun's in my heart/And I'm ready for love" (My adaptation of Singin in the rain!) 😊

"Researchers have tracked muscle contractions in a bird's vocal tract, and reconstructed the song it was silently singing in its sleep. The resulting audio is a very specific call, allowing the team to figure out what the bird's dream was about. ...
When birds sleep, the part of their brains dedicated to daytime singing remains active, showing patterns that resemble those produced while awake. ...
Custom-made electromyography (EMG) electrodes were implanted in the birds [where are the animal rights activists when you need them?] to measure the muscle response and electrical activity in the obliquus ventralis muscle, the most prominent muscle producing the kiskadee’s birdsong. EMG and birdsong audio were recorded simultaneously while the birds were awake and asleep. An existing dynamical systems model of the kiskadee’s sound production mechanism was used to translate the information into synthetic songs. ...
Analyzing muscular activity during sleep revealed consistent activity patterns corresponding to the trills produced by kiskadees during daytime territorial fights. Interestingly, the ‘dreaming trills’ were associated with raised head feathers, the same as during the daytime. ..."

"... Many bird species have complex musculature, so translating syringeal activity into song is a bit of a challenge. ..."

From the abstract:
"During sleep, sporadically, it is possible to find neural patterns of activity in areas of the avian brain that are activated during the generation of the song. It has recently been found that in the vocal muscles of a sleeping bird, it is possible to detect activity patterns during these silent replays. In this work, we employ a dynamical systems model for song production in suboscine birds in order to translate the vocal muscles activity during sleep into synthetic songs. Besides allowing us to translate muscle activity into behavior, we argue that this approach poses the biomechanics as a unique window into the avian brain, with biophysical models as its probe."

Birds sing in their sleep – and now we can decipher their dreams

What Do Bird Dreams Sound Like? (original news release) Researchers translate vocal muscle activity of birds during sleep into synthetic songs.


Synthesizing avian dreams (no public access)

Vocal muscle activity of birds during sleep can be translated into synthetic songs



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