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arXiv · 2607.03496

Trajectory Variance: An Unsupervised Measure of Developmental Vocal Plasticity in Birdsong

Kanghwi Lee
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Abstract

How much does a vocalization change over the course of development? We propose trajectory variance, a per-vocalization plasticity score that answers this question without type labels. A displacement model learns to predict age-conditioned shifts in autoencoder latent space; the variance of its predictions across target ages quantifies how much each vocalization would change if produced at different developmental stages. Evaluated on three zebra finches (183K-274K vocalizations, 40-101 days post-hatch), trajectory variance separates learned song syllables from innate calls (Cohen's d = 0.29-0.57, AUC = 0.58-0.67, after controlling for duration), while no nonparametric baseline achieves consistent separation. Trajectory variance also correlates with spectral flatness across all three birds (r = -0.48 to -0.75): more plastic vocalizations tend to have more tonal, structured spectra.

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Kanghwi Lee. 2026-07-03. Trajectory Variance: An Unsupervised Measure of Developmental Vocal Plasticity in Birdsong. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03496

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