A song sparrow’s short, measured notes are part of a pattern heard far beyond its own species: people and hundreds of kinds of birds often shape their voices in similar ways. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal found shared features in bird calls and human speech and song, drawing on recordings from more than 350 bird species and voices in 52 languages.
The study, published in the journal Science, looks at how animals make and hear sounds. Finding common patterns could help scientists understand the processes behind vocal production and listening across species. The similarities also appear in birds that learn their songs by copying others and in birds whose calls are innate, rather than learned.
Three patterns stood out. Both birds and people tend to use small pitch intervals, meaning one note or sound does not jump dramatically in pitch from the next. Their vocalizations also often have regular, predictable rhythms. And they show phrase-final elongation: the last sound in a phrase tends to last longer than the sounds before it.
The team examined recordings of four bird groups: songbirds, hummingbirds, suboscines and nightjars. Songbirds and hummingbirds learn vocalizations by imitating others, as humans do. Suboscines and nightjars do not learn their songs in this way; their vocalizations are innate. The researchers gathered bird recordings from xeno-canto, a public citizen-science website for wildlife sounds, and manually marked about 70,000 vocal units for analysis. They compared those patterns with publicly available human speech and song from 52 languages.
The researchers had expected that the songs of vocal-learning birds might more closely resemble human voices than the calls of nonlearning birds. The results offered little evidence for that idea. Instead, the shared patterns appeared across both groups. The study is the first to compare learned and innate birdsong patterns in this way and to set them against a global collection of human speech and songs.
Logan James, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow in McGill’s Department of Biology, said some similarities may arise because birds and people face similar physical limits. A large leap in pitch from one note to the next can be difficult to produce. Longer sounds at the ends of phrases, he suggested, may also reflect breathing patterns during vocalization. These are possible explanations, not proof that the same causes are at work in every species.
Senior author Jon Sakata, a McGill biology professor, said the findings could encourage closer study of birds that have received less attention, especially those that do not learn their vocalizations. By showing that shared vocal patterns are not limited to song learners, the research widens the range of species scientists can compare. Future work can test how body mechanics and hearing shape these patterns, and whether other overlooked animals use similar sound structures.