EH10901
- Behavior emerges from the interaction between a nervous system and a peripheral bio-mechanical device executing those instructions. In that perspective, how much of the complexity is coded in the driving commands, and how much emerges in the physical device? In this work we study the acoustically challenging song the Zebra finch, and test the hypothesis that much of its acoustic complexity is due to the nonlinear nature of the avian vocal organ. We test it by reconstructing the parameters of a simple model, and comparing those results with direct measurements of the physiological parameters driving the vocal organ. Simple instructions, driving the nonlinear device, generate the most peculiar and acoustically rich song of the Zebra finch.
