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Practice, they say, makes perfect. Zebra finches are such dedicated musicians that they appear to rehearse their songs during sleep.

It has been that, while zebra finches sleep, their brains spontaneously reproduce the activation patterns they make when they sing during the day. Now it seems the birds鈥� vocal muscles actually move in response to these neural signals.

of the University of Buenos Aires and his colleagues surgically attached electrodes to the vocal muscles of ten zebra finches. In a study published in November, they observed spontaneous twitching similar to that detected during daytime singing ().

However, the song patterns detected were highly variable. It was as if the muscles were rehearsing alternate versions of the songs.

Singing in their sleep

In a second study posted online in January, the team found they could trigger these night-time movements in one vocal muscle, simply by playing songs to the birds while they slept. They tried this with recordings of the birds鈥� own songs as well as synthetic versions of the melodies.

The synthetic versions were less successful at provoking the twitching. However, when it did occur, the muscle movements were more or less identical to those observed when the bird was played its own song. The team describes the response as 鈥渟witch-like鈥�.

The only thing stopping the finches from producing a song seems to be a lack of airflow, says at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. 鈥淚f you blew air against the syrinx [voice organ] while the bird was sleeping, you would probably hear some of these notes.鈥�

The neural signals and muscle movements could be part of a learning process, says at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. 鈥淭his variability seen during sleep may be necessary to provide the brain with new options, new ways of executing the motor program, that can help with either learning song or keeping it stable.鈥�