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Rubber tube used to create bird song

Put together two rubber tubes and pull on a motor to listen to what is music to one's ears, or more likely what will attract a bird! For centuries, hunters have imitated their avian prey by whistling through their fingers or by using carved out wooden bird calls.

Now, a team of physicists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has reproduced many of the characteristics of real bird song with a simple physical model made of a rubber tube.

Bird song is a complex sound full of intricate patterns and rich harmonics and has long been studied by neuroscientists. The research has explained much about how young birds learn these songs from adults and the complex neurological changes that allow them to control their voices.

But Aryesh Mukherjee, a graduate student, suggests that this neural control need not be that complicated. He suspects that the physics of a bird's vocal tract could explain much of the complexity of its voice, even with relatively simple neural control

His bird call device consists of an air source, which creates a flow through a stretched rubber tube (modelled after a bird's vocal tract), and a linear motor that presses on the tube in a fashion analogous to a contracting muscle - no need for any sophisticated equipment!

When analysed on a spectrogram, the harmonics and other characteristics of the sounds made by the physical model closely resemble the songs of a zebra finch.

And the researchers say that with a few tweaks their simple models could mimic a variety of bird calls - all from a rubber tube!

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