mouse song

I'm talking to Temple on the phone right now; she's fascinated by the new research showing that mice can (probably) sing. It's further support for her feeling that music is the language of animals.

Here's what else she has to say:

"The only social cue I could understand was tone. I used to call up clients just so I could hear their voice. If I thought a client was annoyed with me, I would call them up just to see if I could hear this little annoyed whine in their voice. I could tell by their voice that they were annoyed. I could also tell by their voice if they were happy!"

"I could never understand for the longest time why people wanted to meet each other in person. I thought it was enough just to meet people on the phone, because all I needed to do was hear their voice. Meeting them on the phone was as good as meeting them face to face, because at that point I didn't even know eye signals existed."

"I did not know that eye signals existed until I was 50. I read about them in Simon Baron-Cohen's book Mind Blindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. That's how I found out they existed."

                           

Here's The Economist's description of the new research on singing mice (subscription required) :

Timothy Holy and Zhongsheng Guo of the Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, made the discovery after studying how male mice respond to female mouse pheromones, the chemical signals linked, among other things, to mating. The mice made noises inaudible to the human ear, and the researchers recorded and analysed them.

By dropping the pitch of the recordings so that humans could hear it, the researchers found that it sounded remarkably like birdsong. Each mouse made a series of “chirps” with bursts of closely spaced notes interspersed with lulls. Details were published this week in the Public Library of Science Biology.

To be classified as a song, a vocalisation has to contain distinct notes, rather than one sound repeated, as well as motifs and themes that recur from time to time. The researchers identified distinct clusters of pitch changes in the songs by analysing a set of 750 syllables produced by one mouse in a single 210-second recording. They concluded that these pitch changes followed a pattern and were thus a song. Tests with 45 different mice produced similar results, although each mouse had its distinct chanson.

sources:
Beyond Falsetto
Melodic Mice