This paper presents Musimage, a novel system which displays pictures according to the songs being played at the same time. By using the interface the user selects the songs to be played, but the pictures are automatically selected. For each song to be played, the system selects a set of pictures, according to various criteria corresponding to some features of the song. In this sense, the pictur...

How the brain learns and generates temporal sequences is a fundamental issue in neuroscience. The production of birdsongs, a process which involves complex learned sequences, provides researchers with an excellent biological model for this topic. The Bengalese finch in particular learns a highly complex song with syntactical structure. The nucleus HVC (HVC), a premotor nucleus within the avian ...

Sexually reproducing organisms should mate with the highest quality individuals that they can. When female songbirds choose a mate, they are thought to use several aspects of male song that reflect his quality. Under resource-limited environmental conditions, male Lincoln's sparrows (Melospiza lincolnii) vary among one another in several aspects of song quality, including song length, song comp...

There are often situations in which a group of people gather and listen to the same songs. However, majority of existing studies related to music information retrieval (MIR) have focused on personalization for individual users, and there have been only a few studies related to MIR intended for a group of people. Here, we present an Android music player with a music selection function for people...

Zebra finches are age-limited learners; males crystallize their songs at 90 days and do not subsequently alter those songs. However, a variety of interventions, including deafening and syringeal denervation, result in long-term changes to the crystallized song. These changes can be prevented by lesioning nucleus LMAN. As different social contexts for song production result in differential activ...

Urban environments challenge animals with 2 novel impediments to communication: low-frequency anthropogenic noise, which masks vocalizations, and large sound-reflecting structures, which contribute to reverberation. We studied spectral and temporal traits of trill songs of chipping sparrows (Spizella passerina), a species historically found in open grassland habitat, to understand how noise, ur...