Reconstrruction of motor gestures in birdsong

YONATAN SANZ PERL; EZEQUIEL M. ARNEODO; ANA AMADOR; FRANZ GOLLER; GABRIEL B. MINDLIN

Cordoba

Congreso; XXVI Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias (SAN); 2012

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

Behavior emerges as the interaction between a nervous system, a peripheral biomechanical device and the environment.In birdsong production, this observation is particularly important: songbirds are an ideal animal model to unveilhow brain structures reconfigure themselves during learning of a complex behavior as song. Therefore it is important tounderstand which features of behavior are controlled by independent tuning of neurophysiological parameters, andwhich are constrained by the biomechanics of the peripheral vocal organ. In this work we show that many of the acoustic featuresin the Zebra finch song are in fact conditioned by the biomechanics involved. We show how to reconstruct the physiological parameters used to drive the avian vocal organ during birdsong production from recorded song.  The procedure involves fitting the time dependent parameters of a model. It is implemented as dynamical system ruling the behavior of the oscillating labia that modulate the air flow during birdsong production, together with the equations describing the dynamicsof pressure fluctuations in the vocal tract. Finally, we compared the reconstructedinstructions with direct measurements of the physiological parameters during song and synthetised a realistic song.