In every culture, humans speak and sing to each other. We have created an astounding array of languages and musical structures across the globe. And yet, within this diversity, some fundamental sequence patterns are repeated. These are often referred to as “universal” patterns in human vocalization.

Our new research, published this week in Science, reveals that many of these acoustic patterns in human song and speech are also shared with birdsong.

The study compared the songs of 367 bird species with examples of song and speech from 52 human languages.

How we gathered the data

As researchers in animal behaviour and neuroscience and music, we (Logan and Jon) spent 10 years documenting the prevalence of universal human acoustic patterns in the songs of zebra finches.

When Kendra joined our lab during her PhD, she proposed we investigate whether these patterns are shared across other bird species as well.

To research this, we needed a large number of birdsong recordings. Luckily, many people around the world are fascinated by the........

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