Songbirds like parrots and parakeets might be well known for squeaking out embarrassing one-liners and certain four-letter words, but those aren’t the only sounds they can mimic. Birds have been observed copying dog barks, car alarms, and even chainsaws. There’s also no shortage of online videos showing particularly adept birds imitating possibly the world’s most famous robot: R2-D2. But it turns out some species are better equipped to copy the Star Wars droid’s high-pitched beeps and boops than others. The findings are detailed in a paper recently published in Scientific Reports
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in The Netherlands analyzed a trove of volunteer submitted videos showing various songbirds attempting to imitate the R2-D2’s signature sounds. They specifically compared the results among nine different parrot and European starling species.
While most people might immediately associate parrots with vocal mimicry, the starlings in the study actually performed much better, thanks to a uniquely shaped vocal organ that allows them to produce two tones simultaneously. Interestingly, larger brain size, whether in parrots or starlings, also didn’t appear to translate into better mimicry ability.
When it comes to copying R2-D2, the best bet seems to be small birds with small brains.
CREDIT: Birdsingalong Project.
Training birds to beep, whistle, and bloop
A subset of eccentric bird owners have been trying to teach their feathered friends to reenact Star Wars scenes for years. YouTube and Instagram are full of clips showing starlings and parrots attempting to mimic the droid’s robotic sounds, albeit with varying degrees of success. There are even a handful of videos, some with over one million views, created specifically to help train birds to perfect the impression.
For their experiment, the researchers analyzed a total of 115 videos submitted to the citizen science website The Bird Singalong Project. The study analyzed examples where different bird species successfully mimicked both monophonic (single-tone) and multiphonic (multiple-tone) sounds.
CREDIT: Carli Jeffrey.
For context, R2-D2’s “voice” in the Star Wars films was created by sound designer Ben Burtt, using a “ring modulator” on an ARP 2600 modular synthesizer. The modulator combines multiple audio input signals and merges them to create a multitonal output. The result: the chaotic crescendos of sound that R2-D2 makes when it’s startled or stressed. R2-D2, in other words, can produce both monophonic and multiphonic sounds.
As far as the birds are concerned, differences in their anatomy determined which types of robot sounds they could imitate. None of the parrot species analyzed were able to replicate the droid’s multiphonic sounds. Like humans, parrots have a vocal organ shaped in a way that allows them to produce only one tone at a time. By contrast, starlings have vocal organs with two sound sources, giving them the physical ability to mimic R2-D2’s more complex, multi-tonal sounds.
While the parrots weren’t able to fully replicate R2-D2’s vocabulary, they could imitate some of the robot’s simpler, single-toned beeps and boops. Even then though, some parrots fared better than others. Overall, the study found that smaller parrot species, like budgerigars and cockatiels, mimicked the droid’s simple sounds more accurately than larger species like African greys and Amazon parrots.
“In our study we found that parrots with larger brains, and also relatively large shell nuclei, imitated monophonic sounds significantly less accurately than budgerigars and cockatiels that have smaller shell regions and larger core regions,” the researchers wrote. “Parrots with smaller brains, however, have a smaller repertoire of imitated sounds.”
Related: [We finally know how parrots ‘talk’]
When it comes to speech ‘bird brain’ isn’t an insult
Recent studies have shed new light on how songbirds are able to learn phrases and copy sounds with such high levels of accuracy. One study published earlier this year in Nature, analyzed the brain regions of parakeets while they were vocalizing, and found surprising similarities to the neural regions that controls speech in humans.
Other research shows that parrots and macaws even possess the capability to communicate with each other remotely over video calls. Some of these birds can amass vocabularies that rival that of many toddlers. Puck, a pet budgerigar that died in 1994, reportedly learned a shocking 1,728 words.
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