If songbirds could appear on "The Masked Singer" reality TV competition, zebra finches would likely steal the show. That's because they can rapidly memorize the signature sounds of at least 50 ...

Zebra finches don’t just mimic sounds—they understand them, revealing surprising insights into animal communication and cognition.

A study by UC Berkeley researchers discovered that zebra finches can quickly memorize the individual sounds of up to 50 other birds of their kind. The experiment began in December 2018 and found that ...

Male zebra finches learn their song by imitating conspecifics. To stand out in the crowd, each male develops its own unique song. Because of this individual-specific song, it was long assumed that ...

Zebra finches are a prominent model system for vocal learning and auditory system function, yet little is known about the functional development of the auditory system. Here, the authors convincingly ...

Here’s a kind of crazy question that sounds like the beginning of a joke — or maybe Japanese Koan: How do 70 live zebra finches play about a dozen electric guitars? Well the answer can be found ...

Birds create songs by moving muscles in their vocal organs to vibrate air passing through their tissues, and new research shows that these muscles act in concert to create sound. Scientists describe ...

Birdsong is music to human ears. It has inspired famous composers. For the rest of us, it may uplift the spirit and improve attention or simply be a source of delight, fun and learning. But have you ...

When a bird spots a predator and emits an alarm call, do its neighbors think "predator" and then react? Or do they automatically freeze or fly away ...

Like humans who can instantly tell which friend or relative is calling by the timbre of the person's voice, zebra finches have a near-human capacity for language mapping. If songbirds could appear on ...