Sylvan Echoes. Duets for Female Voices

Rapping, a female receptive call, initiates male-female duets in the South African clawed frog.

Finding a sexually receptive partner of the opposite sex is a challenge; one solution is to advertise. That advertising is usually the province of males has shaped scenarios for sexual selection, especially the ardent active male courting the passive but choosy female. Herein we consider an unusual case in which constraints on reproduction may have led to fertility advertisement by female frogs...

Sylvan: multi-core decision diagrams

Decision diagrams such as binary decision diagrams and multivalued decision diagrams play an important role in various fields, including symbolic model checking. An ongoing challenge is to develop datastructures and algorithms for modern multi-core architectures. The BDD package Sylvan provides one contribution by implementing parallelized BDD operations and thus allowing sequential algorithms ...

Identifying Disguised Familiar Female Voices: a Case Study

Copying hierarchical leaders' voices? Acoustic plasticity in female Japanese macaques.

It has been historically claimed that call production in nonhuman primates has been shaped by genetic factors, although, recently socially-guided plasticity and cortical control during vocal exchanges have been observed. In humans, context-dependent vocal convergence with relatives, friends or leaders' voices can be found. Comparative studies with monkeys and apes presenting tolerant social org...

Aging Female Voices: an Acoustic and Perceptive Analysis

This study examines the changes in adult female voices due to the aging process. Acoustic cues in voices that enable listeners to recognize a speaker’s vocal age are specified as well as acoustic cues that straightly indicate the speaker’s chronological age. The analysed data are recordings of the voices of 56 female speakers differing in age. The recorded speech samples include sustained vowel...