Seminars in Hearing Research

Date:  Thursday, February 26, 2026

Location: SMTH 208

Time:  12:00-1:00 pm

Speaker:Romina Najarro Flores, PhD Student, BIO. Lucas Lab

Title:  A Novel Case of Song Transposition in a historically studied Population of Carolina chickadees. AUTHORS: Romina Najarro Flores and Jeffrey Lucas.

Abstract:Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis) commonly sing a tonal song but in Indiana the songs are extremely diverse in structure and are dialectical across different populations. This has made the chickadee song a model system for studying cultural evolution. Previous recordings from the Lafayette song dialect include sites where we had not found evidence of song transposition and sites in which we had across multiple years. Transposition occurs when a song with specific structure shifts to a different frequency key, maintaining the ratios between the specific notes’ frequencies within the song. This generates a set of songs of the same syntax across a larger frequency range. Here, we revisit the song characteristics of Carolina chickadees at these long-studied sites and report preliminary results on the first evidence of transposition in a site that historically had not presented this pattern until recently. The emergence of song transposition in a population with a long history of stability raises questions about the role of landscape connectivity in song learning.

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The working schedule is available here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

The titles and abstracts of the talks will be added here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts