36. Scaling song complexity.
6. Song Learning Often Creates Complex Songs and Large Repertoires
Song complexity
From page 83 in the book.
Scaling song complexity. My scale for complexity is entirely arbitrary. Maybe you could come up with your own scale. What if you tried to rate all the singers in your neighborhood by song duration alone? Or by the number of different "sections" that you hear in a song? Or by tonal quality, or buzzyness, or some other measure of human musicality? Think about it. Classifying the songs in some fashion helps us appreciate the variety among birds, though of course it's irrelevant to the birds themselves. Two other facets of complexity are how many different songs a male has and how those songs are delivered during a performance (see next two sections in the book).