Song of Blackbirds: basic course of blackbirds' language in seven lessons.
Welcome to a course that you won't find in a common language schools' offer. The web page is currently under construction, the author hopes that soon you will find a few easy lessons here that will introduce you to the language which Eurasian blackbird (Turdus merula) uses in its spring songs. For now, we offer a sample from the chapter about structure of the blackbird song.
Blackbird song is quite complex and can be segmented similarly as human speech into words, syllables and phonemes which can be diversely combined creating different syllables from phonemes and new words from syllables. The terminology of individual song parts seems a bit inconsistent, recommended reading will be summarized in the last lesson. We will call the whole blackbird show as song, its short compact parts as strophes (often, these are named as songs in the literature, confusion comes from the influence of German language) and they will be further divided into elements.
Passage of a blackbird song with its structural parts is in the following interactive image. We recommend to try the possibility of slow speed replaying, in approximately one third of the original speed one can distinguish surprisingly detailed elaboration of the blackbirds' melodies. The image is based on the so called spectrograms that represent sound in a graphical way.
Speed: