Behavioural experiments with crickets show that female crickets respond only to the male calling songs with a syllable rate within a specific interval, further it has been discovered that their response is independent of the duty-cycle of the song. Previously a neural control model was posed, which was able to explain how the selectivity of songs with syllable rates within a certain bandwidth c...

Depending on the prosodic choices of the reader, using various acoustic parameters to apply emphasis, the meaning of the text may change. In songs, where the text and music work together, the prosody ensures coherence between the intentions of both languages, reducing possible ambiguities. This paper presents a generative system for automatic composition of melodies from lyrics using the prosod...

In urban environments, anthropogenic noise can interfere with animal communication. Here we study the influence of urban noise on the cultural evolution of bird songs. We studied three adjacent dialects of white-crowned sparrow songs over a 30-year time span. Urban noise, which is louder at low frequencies, increased during our study period and therefore should have created a selection pressure...

We will demonstrate our content-based music information retrieval system with automatic DJ mixing, which proposes a new, entertaining way to listen to MIR results. Typical MIR systems present MIR results to the user in a list format, from which users select and play songs. In order to improve this dull user experience, our system not only conducts content-based MIR, but also automatically mixes...

Little is known about how important social behaviors such as song vary within and among populations for any of the endemic Hawaiian honeycreepers. Habitat loss and non-native diseases (e.g., avian malaria) have resulted in isolation and fragmentation of Hawaiian honeycreepers within primarily high elevation forests. In this study, we examined how isolation of Hawai'i 'amakihi (Chlorodrepanis vi...

Variation in song can play a central role in species and subspecies recognition among birds. The ability of individuals to distinguish between songs of their own versus songs of a different subspecies potentially strengthens local adaptation of subspecific populations. We investigated the degree of vocal divergence and discrimination between two subspecies of Swamp Sparrow (Melospiza georgiana)...

Social learning enables the adjustment of behaviour to complex social and ecological tasks, and underlies cultural traditions. Understanding when animals use social learning versus other forms of behavioural development can help explain the dynamics of animal culture. The dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis) is a songbird with weak cultural song traditions because, in addition to learning songs soc...

Online digital delivery allows the music companies to un-bundle their music albums and offer individual songs to the consumers. Consumers differ in their valuations of singles. A seller might now know the exact consumer valuations but there are resources available that would offer reliable information about consumer population. We develop a stylized model to investigate whether these song singl...

Male zebra finches normally crystallize song at approximately 90 days and do not show vocal plasticity as adults. However, changes to adult song do occur after unilateral tracheosyringeal (ts) nerve injury, which denervates one side of the vocal organ. We examined the effect of placing bilateral lesions in LMAN (a nucleus required for song development but not for song maintenance in adults) upo...

Audio visualizers are programs that take in music and produce images that correspond to the music in some pleasing way. In most songs there are several different parts: the verse, chorus, a solo, and so on. Ideally, a music visualizer would change its output to match the different parts of the song. While it is quite easy for humans to detect the difference between different parts of songs the ...