Diversity within a birdsong

We present a model for the activities of neural circuits in a nucleus found in the brains of songbirds: the robust nucleus of the archistriatum (RA). This is a fore brain song control nucleus responsible for the phasic and precise neural signals driving vocal and respiratory motor neurons during singing. Driving a physical model of the avian vocal organ with the signals generated by the neural model, we produce synthetic songs. This allows us to show that certain connectivity architectures in the RA give rise to a wide range of different vocalizations under simple excitatory instructions.