The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

Ficken 1985),the individual bird itself recombines the same basic set of

call components in many different ways,thus increasing repertoire size.

As another illustration of this strategy for enlarging repertoires,consider

the song of the winter wren (Kroodsma 1980;Kroodsma and Momose

1991).Every male has his own distinctive learned repertoire of five to

ten song types,each up to ten seconds in duration,composed of many

different notes.Each song type is distinct from all others in a male’s

repertoire and from songs of any other male.Close inspection reveals,

however,that at the level of their microstructure,shared features are

present both within and between repertoires (figure 3.4).Each song in

the repertoire contains phrases drawn from a large pool that recur again

and again,but in each song type they are arranged in a different

sequence.Evidently what happens when a young male learns to sing is

that he acquires a set of songs from the adults he hears and breaks them

down into phrases or segments.He then creates variety and enlarges his

repertoire by rearranging these phrases or segments in different patterns.

39 Origins of Music and Speech

Figure 3.4

Sound spectrograms of songs of the winter wren,three from the repertoire of one male

(2A,B,and D) and one from a neighbor (3C).Two sections are marked with dots and

arrows to illustrate sharing of large segments between songs,clearly the result of recom-

bining sections of learned songs during development.(From Kroodsma and Momose 1991.)

Fig.3.4

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