Study
Decrystallization of adult birdsong by perturbation of auditory feedback
Leonardo, Anthony; Konishi, Masakazu
Nature, 1999
Adult zebra finches with fully crystallised song were fitted with a system that played their own song back to them at a short delay whenever they sang, distorting the relationship between what they produced and what they heard. Song was recorded over the following weeks and months, and after the perturbation was removed.
- Studied in
- Taeniopygia guttata
- Sample size
- adult male zebra finches with delayed auditory feedback
Song progressively degraded — syllables were lost, added and distorted — over weeks of perturbed feedback, and largely recovered towards the original song once normal feedback was restored.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Crystallised adult song is actively maintained by a continuing comparison between produced sound and a stored target, rather than being a fixed motor program.
How NatureHQ reads it
This substantially changes how the deafening result should be read. Konishi showed that a crystallised song survives deafening; the natural conclusion was that the song had become a fixed program. Delayed feedback shows something subtler: the song is not fixed, it is held in place by an error signal, and giving the bird a *wrong* error signal is far more destructive than giving it none. The recovery is the striking half — the target is still there after months of the bird singing something else.
- One species, and one that is closed-ended: open-ended learners plausibly maintain song differently.
- Delayed playback is an artificial perturbation with no natural equivalent, and what the bird treats as the error is not directly measured.
- Recovery was substantial rather than complete, and varied between individuals.
Giving an adult bird a slightly wrong echo of itself
Is an adult bird’s finished song a fixed motor programme, or is something still holding it in place?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
How birds learn to sing
Hearing the tutor is not enough. A young bird also has to hear its own attempts, and one that cannot ends up singing as badly as a bird that never heard anything.
Vocal learning
Learned song runs on a specific, mappable set of brain regions with a direct line to the muscles of the voice box — and the birds that cannot learn song do not have that line.
Published by: Nature PortfolioPublished in a Nature Portfolio journal.
Checked against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-02.