Zebra 3.v Songs
Hildegard Lobach
In the early 1970s, Jackson and Hanemann played together in a bar band called Shepherd's Bush, but in late 1974 they left Shepherd's Bush and founded a new band, Maelstrom, with Gelso on drums and Tim Thorson on keyboards.[1] The group initially was a cover band, playing Led Zeppelin and other technically proficient rock groups such as Yes, Jethro Tull, and Pink Floyd.[2]
But in February 1975, after Thorson left, the band decided to stay as a trio, with Hanemann handling keyboards as well as bass. They then adopted the name Zebra after seeing a cover of the magazine Vogue featuring a woman riding a zebra.[1] Initially based in New Orleans, they increasingly played more often on Long Island, and eventually all three members moved there to pursue success.[3] They had introduced their original material into their cover sets years before they were signed to Atlantic Records, including "The La La Song", "Free" and "Bears" (originally entitled "The Bears are Hibernating").
Zebra had been noticed by local colleges and even had some of their early original performances recorded by Long Island FM radio station WBAB, culminating in the inclusion of one of their songs on a release of "WBAB Homegrown Album", which commemorated local acts and performances culled from the station's on-air "Homegrown Hour" program.
Zebra's mainstream debut on Atlantic Records was in 1983 with their eponymous album, produced by Jack Douglas and featuring the singles "Tell Me What You Want" and "Who's Behind The Door?" The band continued to tour throughout the 1980s, but took a temporary break in the early 1990s after being dropped by Atlantic Records. Randy Jackson formed his solo band Randy Jackson's China Rain, and released its only album in the year 1991.
Zebra finally resumed playing in 1994 and released Zebra IV in 2003, their first album of all-new material since 1986. A DVD of live performances, mostly from a show at the House of Blues in New Orleans, was released in the summer of 2007.
During the first half of 2007, drummer Bobby Rondinelli filled in for Guy Gelso, who was undergoing treatment for chest cancer. Fortunately, he came through it and was back with Zebra by the end of that year.[4]
On July 10, 2010, during their 35th-anniversary performance at New Orleans' Mahalia Jackson Theater, Zebra was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame[5] and on October 8, 2012 they were also inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.[6]
In March 2013 Zebra performed on Cruise to the Edge, a concert cruise featuring notable progressive rock bands including Yes, Steve Hackett, UK, Carl Palmer Band, Ambrosia, Saga, Nektar, Glass Hammer and IOEarth.
Although Zebra has not released any studio material since 2003's Zebra IV, the band continues to perform live, mostly in the Gulf Coast and East Coast of the United States, including New Orleans and New York City.
In February 2017 Jackson reported to Shreveport Times that the band was working on a new album: "I have new material and hopefully we'll get to work on a new record in the next couple of months."[7] In addition to a new album, a documentary on Zebra, tentatively titled Tell Me What You Want: 50 Years of Zebra, is in the works.[8]
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Vocal culture is the cornerstone of spoken language, but is not unique to humans1,2,3,4,5. Like humans, songbirds acquire their vocal repertoire via imitation (i.e., vocal learning)6,7,8,9, a process that can give rise to local dialects that persist over hundreds of generations10,11. However, the repertoire of vocal learning birds also has a strong genetic component11,12,13. Across populations, innate biases in song perception, production, and learning sustain species-specific song repertoires13,14,15,16. Canaries, for example, will faithfully imitate songs of abnormal combinatorial structure, but later, as they reach maturity, alter their songs to match a species typical song syntax to which they have not been exposed17. Similarly, zebra finch males (females do not sing) that are trained with random combinatorial transitions of syllable types will generate combinations that are biased toward the species typical18,19. Innate biases may unfold at the scale of generations, too; the descendants of isolated zebra finch tutors, who produce aberrant songs, produce increasingly species typical songs2,19.
Theoretically, vocal imitation should drive song repertoire convergence within groups and divergence across groups20,21,22. Meanwhile, innate biases in imitation might constrain drift. In reality, however, zebra finch songs remain highly diverse within groups and vary only mildly across them22. We do not know whether this diversity serves any function in domesticated zebra finches, but high similarity between songs could potentially generate impoverished communication systems that convey little information about individual identity23,24. In wild songbirds, across species, and even subspecies, the magnitude of individual song variability differs strongly, often for no apparent reason. For example, the songs of the wild Australian zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata castanotis) are much more variable among individuals than those of the closely related wild Timor zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata guttata)25. This variability persists despite the fact that they live in similar climates and have similar social organization.
Here we test how a rich polymorphic repertoire of song syllables is sustained during cultural transmission26 in the Australian zebra finch. We quantify song polymorphism using novel measures of vocal states and acoustic diversity, for studying the statistics of song imitation in a large colony. We find that the polymorphic repertoire is sustained by pupils spontaneously increasing song diversity when tutors have low-diversity songs, and imitating with greater fidelity when tutors have high-diversity songs, a process we call balanced imitation.
a 24 song tutoring lineages. All tutors had pupils in more than a single clutch. Each node represents one individual animal. Node shape represents pupils from the same clutch. Tutor nodes are presented on the bottom and pupil nodes on the top. Similarity scores are presented as quartiles (green for best imitations and red for poorest). Lineages are sorted according to the mean similarity between tutor and pupils from highest (top) to lowest (bottom). b, c Examples of song imitations from tutor AQ12 with a low similarity family (b) and from tutor DG1 with a high similarity family (c). Imitation outcomes are presented as percent acoustic similarity estimates on each sonogram. Red bars outline the repeated song motifs of the tutors. Source data for this figure is in Supplementary Data File 1.
Our measures up to now summarize the distribution of vocal states within a song. We next looked at each vocal state separately and measured how frequencies (abundances) of vocal states are imitated. In prior studies, we noted that vocal imitation in zebra finches is inversely related to model abundance. That is, too much exposure to a tutored song could inhibit learning31. Here we test if this is the case also for abundances of vocal states within a song.
We superimposed these empirically determined pitch intervals (for top and bottom influence) on ranges of mean song pitches obtained in a database of four zebra finch colonies including the current one, and shaded the intervals values green (presumably top influence) and red (presumably low influence; Fig. 7f). We then did the same for frequency modulation (Fig. 7g), and Weiner entropy (Fig. 7h). Across the colonies, the distribution of mean song features was to a large extent confined within the range of high influence in our colony. Therefore, the range of mean feature values of highest imitation influences in our colony, but not of lowest influences, seems consistent across zebra finch colonies. This range, in turn, can be explained by balanced imitation as high influences are associated with high tutor song diversity. In sum, this outcome is consistent with the notion that over generations, songs of high feature diversity are more influential, and therefore shape the overall distribution of mean song features in a similar manner across colonies.
It would be interesting to test if balanced imitation parameters are different across species. Variation in the intensity of the trend to sustain high song diversity and that of the trend to imitate songs accurately could lead to equilibriums that differ according to species and possibly even the ecological conditions in which a species lives. Perhaps species with songs that are similar across individuals engage in weak balanced imitation and vice versa. For example, to explain why the songs of the Timor zebra finch are much more similar across individuals compared to the Australian zebra finch25, we speculate that perhaps a weaker balanced imitation gain in the Timor zebra finches (compared to Australian zebra finches) could potentially increase the odds of extinction of rare song elements, driving the stronger convergence observed in songs across individuals.
Regardless of possible prevalence across species, accounting for balanced imitation in zebra finches might be necessary in order to properly interpret vocal learning outcomes. This is particularly important because mechanisms of vocal learning are studied extensively in Estrildid finches, among which song learning outcomes vary considerably across individuals. In part, this variability is associated with factors like genetics and with tutoring mismatches12,36. Our results indicate that, in addition, deviations from tutor song through reorganization and transformation of copied vocal sounds may be driven by an inclination to optimize song diversity. This can be regarded as a discrete form of error correction during song learning. That is, balanced imitation involves correcting errors from states of minimal (and perhaps also maximal34) diversity. In the framework of error correction37, the developmental question is when and how the vocal learning bird balances between error correction exclusively in reference to tutor sound to error correction in reference to a state of its own sound diversity. A better understanding of this balance and possible transition could reveal the mechanism through which a species-specific level of cultural song diversity is determined23.
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