The short version
- Researchers in Amsterdam and Leiden trained people and zebra finches to recognize the same sequences of five tones.
- When the researchers changed the sounds, people tracked mainly pitch, while the finches drew on pitch and formants together.
- Listeners with more musical experience made better use of formants when the pitch was unreliable.
Researchers at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University trained people and zebra finches on the same task: recognize a sequence of five harmonic tones. They then played altered versions in which the pitch contour changed, the formant contour changed, or both. Formants are the resonant peaks that give a sound its color, the property that separates an “ee” from an “ah” at the same pitch. The study appeared in Communications Biology on October 13.
The two species listened differently. The finches treated pitch and formants as one pattern, so either cue could carry recognition when the other was less useful. People relied mainly on pitch, and formant changes did little to their judgments. “Pitch remains the dominant dimension for human listeners,” said Henkjan Honing, one of the authors. Listeners with more musical experience made better use of formants when the pitch could not be trusted.
The authors read this as a mix of inheritance and experience: finches may be built to merge sound properties, while a life of pitch-rich music and speech makes pitch the human default. The release and abstract give no sample sizes or effect sizes, and the full paper sits behind a login.
