Familiarity, homogeneity, and discrimination of song dialects: Data and playback study stimuli

Male songbirds of many species sing local song dialects that are restricted to defined geographical areas. In most tests of responses to local versus foreign dialects, males respond more aggressively to songs from their own dialect, presumably because local males represent more of a threat to their success. We asked how hearing foreign songs during development and territory establishment affects discrimination of the local dialect in wild Savannah sparrows, Passerculus sandwichensis. After foreign songs had been heard from loudspeakers in the study area in at least two consecutive breeding seasons, males reduced the intensity of their responses to the local version of population-specific buzz segment of the song. Four years after the foreign songs were last broadcast on the study area, males again responded more aggressively to the local version of the buzz. As for the basis of these responses, we found no evidence that birds discriminated among dialects by comparing them to their own s..., The songs of Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis) in the Grand Manan archipelago (New Brunswick, Canada) were recorded using a Marantz digital recorder (PMD670 or PMD660) and a Sennheiser ME-66 directional microphone; our digital recordings used a 44 kHz rate and a 16-bit depth. We also used some songs recorded between 1993 and 2011 to characterize Kent Island variant buzzes and generate stimuli for buzz playbacks (see Wheelwright et al., 2008 for details on methods for those recordings). We digitized songs originally recorded on tape using SoundEdit Pro (Macromedia; 44 kHz and 16 bits). 
The buzz segments of all songs and stimuli used in this study were characterized by measuring their mean frequency (using SoundAnalysisPro; Tchernichovski et al., 1999; http://soundanalysispro.com) and pulse duration (buzz duration divided by the number of repeated sound pulses). These two parameters are sufficient for distinguishing the different dialects of Savannah sparrow buzzes (see Willi..., , # Familiarity, homogeneity, and discrimination of song dialects: Data and song stimuli

The buzz segment of Savannah sparrow songs is generally consistent within a population, but varies across populations. Variation occurred within the Kent Island (New Brunswick, Canada) population in two ways: between 1994 and 2004 a total of 19 males sang a variant buzz that has not been sung since, and between 2013 and 2018 foreign (Western) songs were broadcast from speakers on the study site and were copied by some birds during song development. The paper associated with this data set assessed responses to local and foreign dialects using four buzz. By comparing the acoustic characteristics of each bird's buzz to those of the stimuli it heard, we were able to show that the intensity of a bird's response is not predicted by the acoustic difference between his song and the stimulus. We found that responses to the local dialect depend on a bird's experience both during development and during the cu...