CommentaryUsing frequency ratios to study vocal communication
Section snippets
Reanalyses of work on birdsong performance
Vocal deviation is a measure of birdsong performance that quantifies distances to an estimated limit for how rapidly syllables can be repeated and simultaneously modulated in frequency (Podos 2001). In several songbird species, plots of frequency bandwidth and repetition rate of syllables are markedly triangular, whereby only syllables repeating slowly can have wide frequency bandwidths, strongly suggesting a motor constraint: the more rapidly syllables repeat, the narrower the frequency
Conclusions
Pitch perception and certain aspects of vocal production are better described as frequency ratios than as differences on a linear scale. Thus, for most research questions in animal vocal communication it is advisable to log-transform frequency measurements before averaging or calculating frequency differences. For questions that explicitly compare frequency changes in higher- versus lower-frequency samples (e.g. notes, species), linear frequency could even bias results by overestimating changes
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Cited by (42)
Vocal performance during spontaneous song is equal in male and female European robins
2022, Animal BehaviourSpectral overlap and temporal avoidance in a tropical savannah frog community
2021, Animal BehaviourCitation Excerpt :The 5th and the 95th frequency percentiles of sound energy were measured for each call using Raven Pro (version 1.6, Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.). These raw frequency measurements were then log10 transformed, because aspects of sound perception and production in vertebrates are better described on a ratio scale than a linear scale (Cardoso, 2013). These transformed measurements were then averaged for each species across sites because it was difficult to obtain clear calls for all species at each site.
Urban birdsongs: higher minimum song frequency of an urban colonist persists in a common garden experiment
2020, Animal BehaviourCitation Excerpt :We excluded those measurements (N = 1 song for minimum frequency, and N = 10 songs from 7 different males for maximum frequency) from any analyses involving the power spectrum measurements. All raw frequency measurements (Hz) were log-transformed before further analysis, because modulation and perception of sound frequency both function on a ratio scale (Cardoso, 2013). Log transformation facilitates the comparison of frequency differences across different frequency ranges; otherwise, differences in maximum or peak frequency would be overestimated compared to differences in minimum frequency.