AUDITORY-DISCRIMINATION OF CHORD-BASED SPECTRAL STRUCTURES BY EUROPEAN STARLINGS (STURNUS-VULGARIS)

European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were trained to discriminate two complex harmonic structures modeled after musical chords in a 2-alternative choice task. Musical chords provide rich acoustic structures with which to study relative pitch perception and perceptual invariance in nonhuman animals. The starlings learned the chord discrimination and transferred the discrimination to chords with different root frequencies, thus showing perceptual invariance for the chords. Further transfer tests showed that correlates of chord structure were indeed controlling discrimination performance. The proposition that the starlings were responding primarily to a sensory dimension of consonance and dissonance in the acoustic structures provides a good account of the data. The harmonic principles that govern consonance and dissonance may be important for starling auditory communication and, perhaps, auditory communication of other songbirds. From the standpoint of human music cognition, the data add to previous observations suggesting that the idea of musical universals may be extended to species other than humans.