AUDITORY-DISCRIMINATION OF CHORD-BASED SPECTRAL STRUCTURES BY EUROPEAN STARLINGS (STURNUS-VULGARIS)

European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were trained to discriminate two complex harmonic structures modeled after musical chords in a 2-alter native choice task. Musical chords provide rich acoustic structures wi th which to study relative pitch perception and perceptual invariance in nonhuman animals. The starlings learned the chord discrimination an d transferred the discrimination to chords with different root frequen cies, thus showing perceptual invariance for the chords. Further trans fer tests showed that correlates of chord structure were indeed contro lling discrimination performance. The proposition that the starlings w ere responding primarily to a sensory dimension of consonance and diss onance in the acoustic structures provides a good account of the data. The harmonic principles that govern consonance and dissonance may be important for starling auditory communication and, perhaps, auditory c ommunication of other songbirds. From the standpoint of human music co gnition, the data add to previous observations suggesting that the ide a of musical universals may be extended to species other than humans.