Many features of bird song have made it an increasingly fruitful model for research on a number of important problems in behavioural neurobiology. This text offers an overview of findings in the bird song system that have had a major impact on neuroscience research, and have fundamentally altered our concepts of brain function. The 32 papers constitute the proceedings of a conference on the Behavioural Neurobiology of Bird Song, held in New York in 2002.