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The Journal of Neuroscience, January 19, 2005, 25(3):652-661; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3036-04.2005

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Ensemble Coding of Vocal Control in Birdsong

Anthony Leonardo2 and Michale S. Fee1

1McGovern Institute and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, and 2Computation and Neural Systems Program, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125

Zebra finch song is represented in the high-level motor control nucleus high vocal center (HVC) (Reiner et al., 2004) as a sparse sequence of spike bursts. In contrast, the vocal organ is driven continuously by smoothly varying muscle control signals. To investigate how the sparse HVC code is transformed into continuous vocal patterns, we recorded in the singing zebra finch from populations of neurons in the robust nucleus of arcopallium (RA), a premotor area intermediate between HVC and the motor neurons. We found that highly similar song elements are typically produced by different RA ensembles. Furthermore, although the song is modulated on a wide range of time scales (10-100 ms), patterns of neural activity in RA change only on a short time scale (5-10 ms). We suggest that song is driven by a dynamic circuit that operates on a single underlying clock, and that the large convergence of RA neurons to vocal control muscles results in a many-to-one mapping of RA activity to song structure. This permits rapidly changing RA ensembles to drive both fast and slow acoustic modulations, thereby transforming the sparse HVC code into a continuous vocal pattern.

Key words: zebra finch; motor coding; single unit; chronic recording; vocalization; animal communication

Received July 25, 2004; revised November 22, 2004; accepted November 23, 2004.




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