Daily vocal training is essential for males hungry for mating

– If singing has the same social function among humans as it does in birds, perhaps we should leave it alone…but the muscles that produce song are pretty much common in all vertebrates, including birds and humans, so some of the findings in the study are perhaps… Transferable to us, says Per Stahl, professor at the Department of Medical and Translational Biology at Umeå University and one of the study's authors.

It has long been a mystery why songbirds spend so much time and energy daily singing, even when it seems unnecessary and they have no specific details within earshot. Now an international research project has found the answer. The males are the ones who train so that they can impress the females with their beautiful song and thus have the opportunity to mate.

In the study, it can be seen that after a week's cessation of singing, the birds' vocal muscles lost 50 percent of their ability. The researchers studied recordings of zebra finches before and after daily exercise sessions.

The changes were clearly visible when the recordings were studied in detail, even though the human ear could not hear them. However, female birds are particularly discerning listeners and will notice immediately if a male has neglected exercise even for just a day. In experiments, females consistently chose males who had not taken a break from singing training.

This study is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Leiden University in the Netherlands, the University of Vermont in the USA, and Umeå University. The researchers at Umeå focused mainly on studies of changes in the musculature behind singing.

Singing may seem simple but in reality it requires incredibly complex interaction between a very large number of muscles. However, surprisingly, vocal muscles in humans have not been well explored; The throats of great tenors are a trade secret. Therefore, it is interesting to be able to study the great singers of the animal kingdom so that we can develop clinical voice therapy methods.

The striking thing is that the vocal muscles seem to react in the opposite way to the other muscles of the body during exercise. We can see that the vocal muscles become faster from training, rather than stronger and more durable, and this is how the arm and leg muscles usually react when we train in the gym, says Per Stahl.

Unlike other muscles

The researchers hope that the study can ultimately contribute to the understanding of how to improve vocal training and rehabilitation among people. Songbirds, or oscines, are a very large group of birds, including many of our most familiar species such as crows, starlings, finches, thrushes, and finches.

The study was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.