Motor control of birdsong

Abstract

One of the challenges when considering the motor control of birdsong is to understand how such a wide variety of temporally and spectrally diverse vocalizations are learned and produced. A better understanding of central neural processing, together with direct endoscopic observations and physiological studies of peripheral motor function during singing, has resulted in the formation of new theoretical models of song production. Recent work suggests that it may be more profitable to focus on the temporal relationship between control parameters than to attempt to directly correlate neural processing with details of the acoustic output.