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The high-tech image revealed a remarkable structure. It’s made of delicate cartilage and two membranes that vibrate with airflow at superfast speeds—one on each side of the syrinx—to create two independent sources of sound. Gifted songbirds such as the mockingbird and canary can vibrate each of their two membranes independently, producing two different, harmonically unrelated notes at the same time—a low-frequency sound on the left, a high-frequency sound on the right—and shifting the volume and frequency of each with such breathtaking speed as to produce some of the most acoustically complex ...more
The Genius of Birds
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