Science Friday - The Organ That Gives Birds Their Voices | Common Loons Are Pop Music Icons

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Scientists are studying birds’ unique vocal organ, the syrinx, to better understand its evolutionary history. Also, the eerie calls of the common loon have been heard in songs by Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey, and more.The Organ That Gives Birds Their VoicesHave you ever wondered how a bird sings? Or made some of their less melodic vocalizations, like squawks, trills, or chirps? It all happens in the syrinx, a vocal organ unique to birds. Reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, including humans, use their larynx to produce sounds.The syrinx varies widely between bird species and there’s still a lot that scientists don’t understand about how it works and its evolutionary history. Better understanding the syrinx of living birds can help scientists get closer to figuring out what dinosaurs sounded like. (No, the dinosaur sounds in “Jurassic Park” are not scientifically accurate.)Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks with Dr. Julia Clarke, professor of vertebrate paleontology at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas, Austin, about her recent research studying the syrinxes of ostriches and hummingbirds.Common Loons Are Pop Music IconsFor decades now, one music star has managed to show up on tracks spanning multiple genres and appear alongside many famous artists—while also remaining bafflingly under-recognized. Any guesses?Of course, we’re talking about none other than the common loon—a waterbird with striking red eyes and black-and-white checkerboard plumage. This bird’s calls have been used in songs by artists like Michael Jackson, Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Doja Cat, and Lana Del Rey. They’ve also been used as a sound effect in Hollywood blockbusters like “Harry Potter” and the TV show “Game of Thrones.”So how did this bird’s call become a regular in everything from hip hop and EDM to pop music? A story in Audubon Magazine dove into this, and guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks with author Maddie Burakoff, an associate editor at Audubon.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

You ever wonder what an ostrich sounds like? Well, scientists did too. What we noticed was that there were almost no recordings of ostriches in any of the databases of avian vocalization out there. It's Thursday, June 6th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm SciFry producer Deep Peters Schmidt. We humans use our larynxes to produce sound, but birds evolved an additional vocal organ called the syrings.

Scientists have a lot of unanswered questions about it, And unraveling how this voice box works and how it evolved, could help them figure out how dinosaurs sounded. But before we get there, we'll check in on a non-human, underrated pop culture icon whose voice has been made famous. Here's guest host Ariel Duem Ross. For decades now, one music star has managed to show up on tracks spanning multiple genres and has appeared alongside many famous artists,

while also remaining bafflingly underrated and under-recognized. Any guesses as to who I'm talking about? Here's a hint. I'm talking about the common moon, a waterbird with striking red eyes and a black and white checkerboard body. This bird's calls has been used in songs by artists like Michael Jackson, Nikki Minaj, Lady Gaga, and Lana Del Rey. So how did this bird's call become irregular in everything from hip-hop and EDM to pop music? A story in Audubon magazine dove into this, and the author Maddie Burekoff, an associate editor at Audubon, based in New York City, joins me now.

Maddie, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being here. So take me back to the beginning. How did putting loon calls in a musical track start? Yeah, it goes back decades. Back to when some of these early synthesizer keyboards started to kind of change the way people made music. people could in theory go out and record samples of sounds and instruments and play them back

and be able to repeat them in music. But a lot of these also included preset sample sounds for people who didn't want to go out and do their own legwork. One of these sounds was a loon tremolo, which is the call that sounds a little bit like a maniacal laugh. Back in 1984, when this call was included in one of the most. successful sampler keyboards. This sound started kind of taking off and getting picked up more and more by people who were using this keyboard to make dance hits and house tracks. And so people just kind of started hearing the sound on the dance floor at the club. And more and more groups and musicians started putting it in their own tracks. And I'm sure our listeners would love to hear

what you're talking about. So here's one of those examples that you just mentioned. It's from the late 80s, it's called Pacific State by 808 state. So I'm hoping everybody caught that. There's that like echo that I'm not going to try and do it here on air. Instead, we're going to give you an idea of what the common loon sounds like on its own when it's making this call. Beautiful. Maddie, do we know what this call means? Yeah, so I guess there's a couple of things that are interesting about the use of this call in the kinds of tracks we just heard. one is that the track you just played is kind of has this tropical

like beach dance vibe but of course loons are more famous for spending their summers in remote northern woods and so they're kind of misplaced in a way in these songs but another thing that's interesting is that it's thought to be an alarm call

so actually when whoever recorded the sample was probably stressing out the loon in this moment the more kind of laughs or repetitions it adds to the call that signifies that it is more and more stressed out. Okay, so you're basically telling me that we've been using an alarm call from a bird that's worried about something in its vicinity to get down. Yes. In your reporting, did you speak to some music producers about the use of this call and what it means to them? What did they tell you?

Yeah, so I did get the chance to talk with the producer Y2K, who works a lot with doja cat and other rap and hip-hop artists. So he actually uses a different loon call, which is called The Whale. It's kind of that haunting, echo-y call that a lot of people might mistake for a wolf even. Iconic. Yes, so when I spoke with Y2K, he actually has had a big role in making this call popular today because he has kind of claimed it as his beat tag. He puts it in every single song that he works on as a producer.

So for him, he told me he doesn't have any real-life connection to Lunes. He grew up in Arizona. He lives in California. These are not places where you find Lunes in the wild. But he just thought it sounded great. He described it as a very tasteful sound. And he's mixed in this whale sound into everything he does. now. Right. So here's an example. This is Get Into It, Yeah, by Doja Cat, produced by Y2K. I just started

grooving a little bit in my little home office over here. So we talked about the tremolo. What is this other call? What does it mean? Yes. So the whale is thought to be kind of a contact call for the loon, kind of within the family unit of loons. So for example, if one loon is out foraging on the water at night and its mate is back at home at the nest with the chicks. One of them might call out this whale kind of saying, where are you? And the other one will respond, here I am, so that they can kind of touch base and maybe find each other at night and maybe move closer together if they've gotten a little lost. I like that. What do bird biologists have to say about the use of the common loons, very regular musical appearances? For the most part, a lot of

I love that this loon's call that means so much to people who live in these areas or have childhood memories on these lakes that these calls are showing up in pop music and can kind of reconnect us with the natural world in some ways. Of course, there's the question of, are these calls being misused? They're being placed in their wrong habitats. In film and TV, too, a lot of times their calls will show up in kind of tropical environments or they've even shown up in outer space in some cases or kind of representing different animals. But for the most part, a lot of the researchers I talk to said it's all in good fun. And anything that can re-inspire our love of nature and of these birds is a positive for them. I actually think this whole trend is incredibly delightful.

So I want to ask you, Maddie, if you had to pick the next avian pop star, what bird call would you like to hear sampled? Oh my gosh. Well, actually, there's are two other loon calls that people have not picked up as much as these the loons whale and tremolo. So I would love to hear there's one called the Yodel that is a little bit more complicated, but also conveys a lot of interesting information to other loons. So after reporting the story, what I really wanted is for some producers to take up the challenge of using this other kind of loon call in their music as well and maybe kicking off that trend. The producer for this segment wants me to ask you if you can yodel for us.

I'm blaming it squarely on her, but can you? I don't know if I can't do justice, to be honest. It's a very complicated call, yeah. How about we just play it right now? For my part, I think using some of the calls from the Northern Flickr would work really well. I could totally hear it. Maddie, thank you so much for joining me. This was an absolute delight. Thanks for bringing some tunes to Science Friday. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Maddie Burekoff is an associate editor at Audubon Magazine in New York City. Have you ever wondered how a bird sings or how birds make some of their less melodic sounds like squawks, trills, or chirps? It all happens in the syrinx, a vocal organ unique to birds. reptiles, amphibians and mammals, including humans, use their larynx to produce sounds. But birds have a syrinx. And the syrinx varies widely between species. But there's still so much that scientists don't yet understand about how it works or even its evolutionary history. And better understanding the syrinx of living birds get scientists one step closer to figuring out what dinosaurs sounded like.

Because no, Jurassic Park isn't scientifically accurate. Joining me now to talk about her recent studies about the serings is my guest, Dr. Julia Clark, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Clark, welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. To start us off, how did you get started down the path of researching the bird's searinks, you know, the bird's vocal organ? Yeah, it's been a long journey.

I attribute it in part to finding the earliest known. fossilized remains of the syrinx in a specimen that I was working on from Antarctica. And that was probably 10 years ago. And what we found was that the three-dimensional morphologies that happened to be preserved in this exceptional fossil were not really directly comparable across birds. We didn't have similar data from most species of living birds. And so we had to come up and generate a very new type of data on the syringes. Huh. Okay. So one of the papers you and your team recently published focused on the syringes of ostriches. Why ostriches? And what did you find out about how they make sounds?

We have two major lineages of living birds. One we call the paleognase and the other is called the meyugnates. And ostriches are part of the paleognaith group. And so if we think of that really deep split within living birds. We want to understand not just the serenks of songbirds or parts of one side of the tree, but we need to understand the syrinx better in the other part of the tree. And ostriches are part of that other branch, and they're accessible. We could go to an ostrich farm that was just north of Austin, Texas, near Waco, and we could, with a very nice collaborative relationship with the farmers there have access to baby and adult, animals that happen to die on the farm, and we could look at males, we could look at females, we could record them.

Got it. And so what did you find with regards to ostriches specifically? What we noticed was that there were almost no recordings of ostriches in any of the databases of avian vocalization out there. There were under about 10 recordings total. And that was striking for something that we could, you know, is proverbially in our collective backyard. So when we started studying the ostriches, what was striking was how vocal they were and how many different types of calls they produced. And these calls, you know, included types that had never been described in the literature. That was incredibly cool. There's like gurgles, peeps, the so-called famous boom call that's produced by male ostriches.

I actually think that we have one of those recordings and we can play a boom and a rattle. So we're going to play that right now. That's incredible. So we didn't understand the diversity of those calls or how they were made before you did this research. Well, we're still, you know, getting at that. I think with the boom call, that's one of the most striking and kind of it had gotten a bunch of attention. And this is a male call that is produced with the mouth closed and they inflate the neck, the esophagus. So the neck kind of expands out, looks kind of like a big pink sausage. And that got a

lot of attention. But all of the other calls, like what you heard with the gurgle or the rattle call, those had not been described. The sonograms hadn't been uploaded to these different resources. So that was striking. And, you know, before we started this work, I think, think we can say we didn't know what the vocal organ of living female ostriches looked like. And we were able to confirm that although the females don't produce the boom call, their vocal organs are nearly identical to that of males, and that there might be even more calls produced in the wild that we were unable to, you know, weren't represented in the recordings we have, but there's like one tantalizing egg laying call that females might improve.

importantly use their perfectly robust vocal organ to produce in the wild. One of the things that really strikes me about the work that you're doing is that it highlights how many gaps in our knowledge existed and also still currently exist, right? Why are there so many gaps in how we understand syrinxes, you know, the bird's vocal organ? Ostrogies are well-known, well-loved species. Why hasn't this been examined before? So I think there's two parts to that story. I do think that if you look across animals, it's striking that new technologies, new ways of imaging the tissues or looking at how the tissues produce sound have advanced significantly. We can stain the tissues and then image them in three dimensions. I think it's kind of amazing if you thought the entire history of like musical instruments, like represent. of musical instruments were all two dimensions, how much you would lose about how a musical instrument

functions, you know? Exactly. Yeah, totally. All right. So technological advances. Yes, part of it. You know, the whole field of anatomy languished a bit while we discovered new kind of approaches like genetic approaches, genomic approaches. And, you know, anatomy is is a very time-consuming thing, but it is deployed by paleontologists like me because we need to make sense of the fossilizable structures. So, okay, you're a paleontologist and you're interested in ancient birds and their predecessors, dinosaurs. How can studying living birds help us figure out what dinosaurs sounded like? Yes, this has been the question driving a lot of this research. And the motivation for this kind of really time-consuming detailed anatomy is to make sense of structures

that can preserve in deep time. That is like little remnants or whatever we can get from an extinct dinosaur that we can bring these new data from living animals to figure out, okay, what were they doing? What does this mean about the origin of the precursors to bird song? I guess one might think of it this way is you have these tantalizing fossils, these incredible fossils of extinct dinosaurs. You have this phenotype that is of such interest to ornithologists and such interest to me, which is song, which is sound, which is vocal communication, and how would you approach that in something that is silent in a rock? and to do that, you have to generate new kinds of data or data that is extremely detailed

that allows you to kind of take a structure and bring it to life, so to speak, to notice where the muscles might have attached, to notice where geometries might have changed, and this is like what really fascinates me about this question. And the reason I've been studying it so long is that we still don't have all the answers, So I got to keep going. This was so much fun. Dr. Clark, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. Oh, thank you for your interest. And I hope you can never look at a bird vocalizing the same way again. I definitely can't. Dr. Julia Clark is a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of

Texas, Austin. That's it for today's show. Lots of folks help make it happen, including Rasha Eriety, Sandy Roberts, Shoshana Bugscombe. On tomorrow's episode, we are round up this week's science news. Join us. I'm sci-fi producer D. Petersmith.