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Wilson Songs Analysis

Decent Essays

Have you ever got a song stuck in your head from hearing your friend singing it? Or made up the lyrics to a song you don’t know the words to? Well robins do that all the time too says a study from “The Wilson Journal of Ornithology.” The study looked how similar or unique robin’s songs were to their peers and raised the very interesting question do robins make up there own songs or is it copied from other robins in their community? Robins sing for a number of reasons. The two main reasons are to attract mates and keep intruders out of their territory. Robin’s songs are comprised of what are called “elements.” Elements are comprised of one or more musical notes. The robin has two types of elements that it uses in its song. The most common and …show more content…

He also found that only 5 of the robins had elements in common with robins not neighboring them. Which proves that robins do in fact imitate robins that are near by. While males from the same site shared more elements then other sites Steven L. Johnson also found though that the majority of the elements found in the robins song ended up being unique to them. So unique in fact he was able to identify them just by song after a while of recording them. Where as for the hatchlings there was evidence of the robins both inventing and imitating because the percentage of shared elements varied greatly. However the robins did produce their own unique elements that were different from any of the tapes provided. Proving that robins in fact do produce their own unique elements. He also found that the nestlings had more elements in common with each other then the tapes suggesting that robins learn quite a bit from their peers. Overall the results of the two different experiments suggested that social interaction with other robins encourages robins to imitate their neighbors suggesting that the benefits of sharing elements are for a large part social. It also suggests that it is unlikely that a large amount of sharing is due to songs learned or imitated from a robin’s parents or family members due to the fact that two twins were placed near each other and copied very little of each others song’s compared to other hatchlings. A Possible interpretation is that there is a just a predisposition for robins to learn from their parents or relatives. So to answerer the question “imitation or invention?” The answer is both. Robins both imitate their neighbors and create their own music, similarly to us humans. Further research is required to explain why robins both create and copy songs as well as what role different song types

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