The Lyre bird imitating sounds
We are now in the intra-assemblage. Its organization is very rich and complex. It includes not only the territorial assemblage but also assembled, territorialized functions. Take the Troglodytidae, the wren family: the male takes possession of his territory and produces a "music box refrain" as a warning to possible intruders; he builds his own nests in his territory, sometimes as many as a dozen; when a female arrives, he sits in front of a nest, invites her to visit, hands his wings, and lowers the intensity of his song, reduced to a mere trill. It seems that the nesting function is highly territorialized, since the nests are prepared by the male alone before the arrival of the female, who only visits and completes them; the "courtship" function is also territorialized, but to a lesser degree, since the territorial refrain becomes seductive by changing in intensity. All kinds of heterogeneous elements show up in the intra-assemblage: not only the assemblage marks that group materials, colors, odors, sounds, postures, etc., but also the various elements of given assembled behaviors that enter into a motif. For example, a display behavior is composed of a dance, clicking of the beak, an exhibition of colors, a posture with neck outstretched, cries, smoothing of the feathers, bows, a refrain...the first question to be asked is what holds these territorializing marks, territorial motifs, and territorialized functions together in the same intra-assemblage. This is a question of consistency: the "holding together" of heterogeneous elements. At first, they constitute no more than a fuzzy set, a discrete set that later takes on consistency.[...]
The territorial assemblage is inseparable from lines or coefficients of deterritorialization, passages, and relays toward other assemblages. there have been many studies on the influence of artificial conditions on bird song, but the results vary both by species and according to the kind and timing of the artifice. Many birds are receptive to the songs of other species, if they are exposed to them during the critical period, and will reproduce the alien songs later on. The chaffinch, however seems much more devoted to its own matters of expression and retains an innate sense of its own tonal quality even if exposed to synthetic sounds. the outcome also depends on whether the birds are isolated before or after the critical period. In the first case, chaffinches develop a nearly normal song; in the second, the subjects in the isolated group (who cannot hear each other) develop an abnormal, nonspecies-specific song that is nevertheless common to the group (see Thorpe). In any event, it is necessary to consider the effects of deterritorialization or denatalization on a given species at a given moment. whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial conditions), we say that a machine is released. that in fact is the distinction we would like to propose between maching and assemblage: a machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and has been freed through deterritorialization. What we cal machinic statements are machine effects that define consistency or enter matters of expression. Effects of this kind can be very diverse but are never symbolic or imaginary; they always have a real value of passage or relay.
Deleuze and Guattari, "Of The Refrain"
