Female songbirds are thought to assess males based on aspects of song, such as repertoire size or amount of singing, that could potentially provide information about male quality. A relatively unexplored aspect of song that also might serve as an assessment signal is a male’s ability to perform physically challenging songs. Trilled songs, such as those produced by swamp sparrows (Melospiza geor...

The behavioural signals used in mate selection are a key component in the evolution of premating isolating barriers and, subsequently, the formation of new species. The importance of mating signals has a long tradition of study in songbirds, where many species differ in their song characteristics. In oscine songbirds, individual birds usually learn their songs from a tutor. Mistakes during lear...

Motor-related forebrain areas in higher vertebrates also show responses to passively presented sensory stimuli. However, sensory tuning properties in these areas, especially during wakefulness, and their relation to perception, are poorly understood. In the avian song system, HVC (proper name) is a vocal-motor structure with auditory responses well defined under anesthesia but poorly characteri...

This paper proposes a system that automatically locates and extracts songs from digitized movies and classifies the extracted songs according to their genre using a video-based genre identification algorithm. A song grammar particularly applicable to Bollywood movies has been proposed and used subsequently to construct a probabilistic timed automaton that differentiates songs from rest of the s...

The songs of oscine passerine birds vary on many spatial scales, reflecting the actions of diverse evolutionary pressures. Here we examine the songs of Cisticola erythrops, which effectively signal species identity across a geographical area spanning 6500 km in sub-Saharan Africa. Selection for species identification should promote stability in song traits, while sexual selection and geographic...

This paper focuses on cover song identification among datasets potentially containing millions of songs. A compact representation of music contents plays an important role in large-scale analysis and retrieval. The proposed approach is based on high-level summarization of musical songs using chord profiles. Search is performed in two steps. In the first step, the Locality Sensitive Hashing (LHS...

Charles Darwin posited that secondary sexual characteristics result from competition to attract mates. In male songbirds, specialized vocalizations represent secondary sexual characteristics of particular importance because females prefer songs at specific frequencies, amplitudes, and duration. For birds living in human-dominated landscapes, historic selection for song characteristics that conv...

Avian vocalizations are common examples of the complex signals used by animals to negotiate during agonistic interactions. In this study, we used two playback experiments to identify agonistic signals in a songbird species with several acoustically complex songs and calls, the veery. In the first experiment, we compared veery singing behavior in response to simulated territorial intrusions incl...

As a result of the growth of online music streaming services, a large number of playlists have been created by users and service providers. The title of each playlist provides useful information, such as the theme and listening context, of the songs in the playlist. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit the words extracted from playlist titles for text-based music retrieval. The main ide...

Factors intrinsic or extrinsic to individuals, such as their quality or the quality of competition in their social environment, can influence their communication signaling effort. We hypothesized that telencephalic monoamine secretion mediates the effects of a male's own quality and quality of his social environment on his sexual signaling effort. The duration of a male European starling's (Stu...