Figure 1. Experimental setup included wn-rearing and social isolation.

Experimental setup included normal acoustic and social rearing for control birds, and a continuous white-noise exposure and social isolation for wn-reared birds. The song output of one control male and one wn-reared male are shown in spectrogram form on the right: the control males sang a normal song, typical of normal/tutored zebra finches; and the wn-reared males sang a scratchy, perseverative song, typical of untutored/isolate song. Although we did not systematically study the differences in vocal output, we used song production as a means to verify the effectiveness of the white noise exposure and isolation since song development in males depends on both natural auditory spectro-temporal cues and social interactions.