Swan Song for Birdsong

By Sylvia Torti

Why do birds sing? This is an age-old question, and answers have been proposed by everyone from Artistotle and Aristophanes to David Attenborough and the late poet Maya Angelo, but just as interesting as the “why do birds sing?” is the “how do they do it?”

Dr. Franz Goller, who is retiring from the School of Biological Sciences after twentythree years, has made significant advances to our understanding of how birds sing. His work has elucidated the mechanisms of neuromuscular coordination of the various systems involved in birdsong production, systems that are analogous in interesting ways to human speech.

Walking into Franz’s lab in 2002, I was, of course, first struck by the musicality of the space. There were scarlet-beaked zebra finches hopping on and off their perches. Starlings, robins, white-crowned sparrows, and yellow-headed blackbirds, and around all of these birds were curious scientists trying to listen in (so to speak) for a deeper understanding of how these birds produced sounds. generate such different ranges of sound features? What aspects of song are difficult to produce and make individual birds into vocal athletes? Do individual birds’ individualistic skill sets and weaknesses appear in their song performance? And perhaps most startling, Why do birds silently sing in their dreams?

Pursuit of these questions led Franz frequently from his lab and into the outdoors. He established collaborative friendships with colleagues in the US, Europe, and South America and travelled in pursuit of birds that allowed him to address his ever increasing number of questions.

What I found so rare was that Franz opened his lab, and shared his love of birds, birdsong, and scientific exploration (as well as good coffee) not only with students, budding scientists, and colleagues, but also artists and writers. I was a fortunate recipient of his openness and patience, which resulted in my novel Cages (Schaffner Press 2017), a fictional story that takes place largely inside a birdsong laboratory.

Franz also collaborated with Krista Caballero and Frank Ekeberg (a visual artist and sound artist, respectively) on their Birding the Future series entitled Lab Birds (https://www.birdingthefuture.net/lab). This willingness to engage other disciplines and to take the time to enter into protracted, often difficult conversations around

Franz’s scientific contributions are many and broad. Early on, using the first-ever fiber optic visualization of the syrinx, he showed direct evidence for the mechanism of sound generation by the syrinx. He then made major contributions to our understanding of how peripheral mechanisms (muscles and nerves that drive the entire sound system from the brain to the air sacs to the beaks) contribute to sound production.

Perhaps his most lasting impact from this work on peripheral mechanisms is the utility of this information to those who study the brain, behavior and evolutionary significance of communication behavior. His contributions played a central role in understanding vocal performance in these other disciplines, specifically animal behavior, tradeoffs or cost of song, sexual selection and evolutionary trends in different groups of birds in terms of acoustic features (by syrinx structure) important for vocal performance.

Franz is always looking for new ways to ask questions about song and most recently, he has been investigating how sleep may be involved in song-like activation (and memory) in the brain.

Originally from the Tyrolian region of Austria, Franz received his undergraduate and MSc. degrees from the University of Innsbruck. He then came to the US for his doctorate (University of Notre Dame) and post-doctoral work (Indiana University). He joined the University of Utah’s Department of Biology, now the School of Biologial Sciences, in 1998.

Over the course of his career, he received millions of dollars in research funds to support his work as well as that of nine graduate students and six post-doctoral fellows. Graduate students across campus sought out Franz to serve on their theses committees for his attentiveness to their work, his creative input and his showing up for meetings on time! For these traits, he was often asked to serve on committees in areas well outside of his expertise, spanning neuroscience, behavior and physiology of vertebrates, neuroethology and thermoregulation in insects, etc. In the last five years alone, he served on twenty PhD committees.

Franz is also a well-loved professor who was extraordinarily generous with his time. He taught courses in SBS that ranged from large courses (Evolution and Diversity of Life) to specialized physiology courses (Comparative, Environmental and Human Physiology) to Honors courses (Science and Storytelling) to field courses (Natural History of the Colorado Plateau where students not only raved about the science experience, but the daily meals cooked by Franz).

The School of Biological Sciences thanks Franz for his contributions and wishes him the best in his upcoming years as Emeritus Professor of Biology.

Syliva Torti is Dean of the University of Utah Honors College, SBS adjunct Professor, and alumna of the School (PhD’98). She is the author of two novels, including Cages, winner of the 2016 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature.

Photo by Skyler Ewing on Pexels