Promoter: Sam Van Wassenbergh
​Supervisor: Irene Montañez Rivera
Subject: A songbird's beak plays a functional role in song production, as its opening and closing must be actively adjusted to maintain the song's musical quality. In Darwin’s finches, which evolved diverse specialisations in beak function according to the diverse feeding niches they occupy, the functional linkage between their beaks and songs may have contributed to speciation and adaptive radiation.
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This project aims to examine sound recordings of singing male Darwin’s finches from eight species to extract song characteristics (e.g., trill rate, maximal and minimal frequency, bandwidth) and match them to movement parameters like beak gape and beak movement frequency. This will help us gain more insight into the beak performance of the different species of Darwin’s finches and the force-velocity trade-off underlying their beak movement.
Techniques: kinematic analysis of the beak using XMALab, sound analysis using Audacity/Signal, data analysis and statistical evaluation using R.