Synthesizing avian dreams

Abstract

During sleep, sporadically, it is possible to find neural patterns of activity in areas of the avian brain that are activated during the generationof the song. It has recently been found that in the vocal muscles of a sleeping bird, it is possible to detect activity patterns during these silentreplays. In this work, we employ a dynamical systems model for song production in suboscine birds in order to translate the vocal musclesactivity during sleep into synthetic songs. Besides allowing us to translate muscle activity into behavior, we argue that this approach poses thebiomechanics as a unique window into the avian brain, with biophysical models as its probe.