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McCowan B, Hubbard J, Walker L, Sharpe F, Frediani J, Doyle L. Interactive bioacoustic playback as a tool for detecting and exploring nonhuman intelligence: "conversing" with an Alaskan humpback whale. PeerJ 2023; 11:e16349. [PMID: 38047015 PMCID: PMC10693240 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.16349] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/09/2023] [Accepted: 10/04/2023] [Indexed: 12/05/2023] Open
Abstract
Here we report on a rare and opportunistic acoustic turn-taking with an adult female humpback whale, known as Twain, in Southeast Alaska. Post hoc acoustic and statistical analyses of a 20-min acoustic exchange between the broadcast of a recorded contact call, known as a 'whup/throp', with call responses by Twain revealed an intentional human-whale acoustic (and behavioral) interaction. Our results show that Twain participated both physically and acoustically in three phases of interaction (Phase 1: Engagement, Phase 2: Agitation, Phase 3: Disengagement), independently determined by blind observers reporting on surface behavior and respiratory activity of the interacting whale. A close examination of both changes to the latency between Twain's calls and the temporal matching to the latency of the exemplar across phases indicated that Twain was actively engaged in the exchange during Phase 1 (Engagement), less so during Phase 2 (Agitation), and disengaged during Phase 3 (Disengagement). These results, while preliminary, point to several key considerations for effective playback design, namely the importance of salient, dynamic and adaptive playbacks, that should be utilized in experimentation with whales and other interactive nonhuman species.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brenda McCowan
- SVM: Population Health and Reproduction, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, United States
| | - Josephine Hubbard
- Animal Behavior Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, United States
| | - Lisa Walker
- Grooved Whale Project, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
| | - Fred Sharpe
- Alaska Whale Foundation, Petersburg, Alaska, United States
| | - Jodi Frediani
- Jodi Frediani Photography, Santa Cruz, California, United States
| | - Laurance Doyle
- SETI Institute, Mountain View, California, United States
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Li L, Wang Q, Qing X, Qiao G, Liu X, Liu S. Robust unsupervised Tursiops aduncus whistle enhancement based on complete ensembled empirical optimal envelope local mean decomposition with adaptive noise. THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2022; 152:3360. [PMID: 36586875 DOI: 10.1121/10.0016500] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/09/2022] [Accepted: 11/25/2022] [Indexed: 06/17/2023]
Abstract
Whistle enhancement is an essential preprocessing step in studying dolphin behavior and population distributions. We propose a robust unsupervised whistle enhancement scheme based on improved local mean decomposition using adaptive noise estimation and logarithmic spectral amplitude. First, to further mitigate the mode aliasing problem effect in whistle signal decomposition and achieve better spectral separation of modes, we present a complete ensembled empirical optimal envelope local mean decomposition with adaptive noise algorithm. According to the envelope characteristics of the whistle signals, the proposed algorithm optimally and adaptively decomposes the noisy signal into product functions (PFs) with amplitude and frequency modulation. Second, the whistle enhancement framework consists of the improved minima-controlled recursive averaging for adaptive noise estimation, optimally modified log-spectral amplitude for each noisy product function enhancement, and the Hurst index for reconstructing pure whistle signal estimations with the least damaged PFs. Finally, the proposed scheme is applied to a dataset of long calls from two Tursiops aduncus individuals. After constructing the pure whistle dataset, the experimental results show that the proposed scheme performs better than other compared whistle enhancement schemes under different signal-to-noise ratios.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lei Li
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Qian Wang
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Xin Qing
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Gang Qiao
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Xinyu Liu
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Songzuo Liu
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
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Semple S, Ferrer-I-Cancho R, Gustison ML. Linguistic laws in biology. Trends Ecol Evol 2022; 37:53-66. [PMID: 34598817 PMCID: PMC8678306 DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2021.08.012] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/26/2021] [Revised: 08/24/2021] [Accepted: 08/25/2021] [Indexed: 01/03/2023]
Abstract
Linguistic laws, the common statistical patterns of human language, have been investigated by quantitative linguists for nearly a century. Recently, biologists from a range of disciplines have started to explore the prevalence of these laws beyond language, finding patterns consistent with linguistic laws across multiple levels of biological organisation, from molecular (genomes, genes, and proteins) to organismal (animal behaviour) to ecological (populations and ecosystems). We propose a new conceptual framework for the study of linguistic laws in biology, comprising and integrating distinct levels of analysis, from description to prediction to theory building. Adopting this framework will provide critical new insights into the fundamental rules of organisation underpinning natural systems, unifying linguistic laws and core theory in biology.
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Affiliation(s)
- Stuart Semple
- School of Life and Health Sciences, University of Roehampton, London, UK.
| | - Ramon Ferrer-I-Cancho
- Complexity and Quantitative Linguistics Laboratory, Laboratory for Relational Algorithmics, Complexity, and Learning Research Group, Departament de Ciències de la Computació, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 08034 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
| | - Morgan L Gustison
- Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
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Li L, Qiao G, Liu S, Qing X, Zhang H, Mazhar S, Niu F. Automated classification of tursiops aduncus whistles based on a depth-wise separable convolutional neural network and data augmentation. THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2021; 150:3861. [PMID: 34852567 DOI: 10.1121/10.0007291] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/01/2021] [Accepted: 11/01/2021] [Indexed: 06/13/2023]
Abstract
Whistle classification plays an essential role in studying the habitat and social behaviours of cetaceans. We obtained six categories of sweep whistles of two Tursiops aduncus individual signals using the passive acoustic mornitoring technique over a period of eight months in the Xiamen area. First, we propose a depthwise separable convolutional neural network for whistle classification. The proposed model adopts the depthwise convolution combined with the followed point-by-point convolution instead of the conventional convolution. As a result, it brings a better classification performance in sample sets with relatively independent features between different channels. Meanwhile, it leads to less computational complexity and fewer model parameters. Second, in order to solve the problem of an imbalance in the number of samples under each whistle category, we propose a random series method with five audio augmentation algorithms. The generalization ability of the trained model was improved by using an opening probability for each algorithm and the random selection of each augmentation factor within specific ranges. Finally, we explore the effect of the proposed augmentation method on the performance of our proposed architecture and find that it enhances the accuracy up to 98.53% for the classification of Tursiops aduncus whistles.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lei Li
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Gang Qiao
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Songzuo Liu
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Xin Qing
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Huaying Zhang
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Suleman Mazhar
- Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Fuqiang Niu
- Third Institute of Oceanography, Ministry of Natural Resources, Xiamen 361000, China
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5
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Kershenbaum A, Demartsev V, Gammon DE, Geffen E, Gustison ML, Ilany A, Lameira AR. Shannon entropy as a robust estimator of Zipf's Law in animal vocal communication repertoires. Methods Ecol Evol 2020. [DOI: 10.1111/2041-210x.13536] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/30/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Arik Kershenbaum
- Department of Zoology University of Cambridge Cambridge UK
- Girton CollegeUniversity of Cambridge Cambridge UK
| | - Vlad Demartsev
- Department of Biology University of Konstanz Konstanz Germany
| | | | - Eli Geffen
- School of Zoology Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv Israel
| | - Morgan L. Gustison
- Department of Integrative Biology University of Texas at Austin Austin TX USA
| | - Amiyaal Ilany
- Faculty of Life Sciences Bar Ilan University Ramat Gan Israel
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Clink DJ, Lau AR. Adherence to Menzerath's Law is the exception (not the rule) in three duetting primate species. ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE 2020; 7:201557. [PMID: 33391812 PMCID: PMC7735330 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.201557] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/30/2020] [Accepted: 10/27/2020] [Indexed: 05/04/2023]
Abstract
Across diverse systems including language, music and genomes, there is a tendency for longer sequences to contain shorter constituents; this phenomenon is known as Menzerath's Law. Whether Menzerath's Law is a universal in biological systems, is the result of compression (wherein shortest possible strings represent the maximum amount of information) or emerges from an inevitable relationship between sequence and constituent length remains a topic of debate. In non-human primates, the vocalizations of geladas, male gibbons and chimpanzees exhibit patterns consistent with Menzerath's Law. Here, we use existing datasets of three duetting primate species (tarsiers, titi monkeys and gibbons) to examine the wide-scale applicability of Menzerath's Law. Primate duets provide a useful comparative model to test for the broad-scale applicability of Menzerath's Law, as they evolved independently under presumably similar selection pressures and are emitted under the same context(s) across taxa. Only four out of the eight call types we examined were consistent with Menzerath's Law. Two of these call types exhibited a negative relationship between the position of the note in the call and note duration, indicating that adherence to Menzerath's Law in these call types may be related to breathing constraints. Exceptions to Menzerath's Law occur when notes are relatively homogeneous, or when species-specific call structure leads to a deterministic decrease in note duration. We show that adherence to Menzerath's Law is the exception rather than the rule in duetting primates. It is possible that selection pressures for long-range signals that can travel effectively over large distances was stronger than that of compression in primate duets. Future studies investigating adherence to Menzerath's Law across the vocal repertoires of these species will help us better elucidate the pressures that shape both short- and long-distance acoustic signals.
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Affiliation(s)
- Dena J. Clink
- Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA
| | - Allison R. Lau
- Animal Behavior Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
- California National Primate Research Center, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
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7
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Clink DJ, Ahmad AH, Klinck H. Brevity is not a universal in animal communication: evidence for compression depends on the unit of analysis in small ape vocalizations. ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE 2020; 7:200151. [PMID: 32431905 PMCID: PMC7211885 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.200151] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/25/2020] [Accepted: 03/10/2020] [Indexed: 05/04/2023]
Abstract
Evidence for compression, or minimization of code length, has been found across biological systems from genomes to human language and music. Two linguistic laws-Menzerath's Law (which states that longer sequences consist of shorter constituents) and Zipf's Law of abbreviation (a negative relationship between signal length and frequency of use)-are predictions of compression. It has been proposed that compression is a universal in animal communication, but there have been mixed results, particularly in reference to Zipf's Law of abbreviation. Like songbirds, male gibbons (Hylobates muelleri) engage in long solo bouts with unique combinations of notes which combine into phrases. We found strong support for Menzerath's Law as the longer a phrase, the shorter the notes. To identify phrase types, we used state-of-the-art affinity propagation clustering, and were able to predict phrase types using support vector machines with a mean accuracy of 74%. Based on unsupervised phrase type classification, we did not find support for Zipf's Law of abbreviation. Our results indicate that adherence to linguistic laws in male gibbon solos depends on the unit of analysis. We conclude that principles of compression are applicable outside of human language, but may act differently across levels of organization in biological systems.
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Affiliation(s)
- Dena J. Clink
- Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
| | - Abdul Hamid Ahmad
- Faculty of Sustainable Agriculture, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Sandakan Campus, Sabah, Malaysia
| | - Holger Klinck
- Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
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8
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Casas B, Hernández-Fernández A, Català N, Ferrer-i-Cancho R, Baixeries J. Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language. COMPUT SPEECH LANG 2019. [DOI: 10.1016/j.csl.2019.03.007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/27/2022]
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9
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Ferrer-i-Cancho R, Vitevitch MS. The origins of Zipf's meaning-frequency law. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol 2018. [DOI: 10.1002/asi.24057] [Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/11/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho
- Complexity and Quantitative Linguistics Lab. LARCA Research Group, Departament de Ciències de la Computació; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord, Edifici Omega, Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3; 08034 Barcelona Catalonia Spain
| | - Michael S. Vitevitch
- Spoken Language Laboratory, Department of Psychology; University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Blvd.; Lawrence KS 66045 USA
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Kershenbaum A, Déaux ÉC, Habib B, Mitchell B, Palacios V, Root-Gutteridge H, Waller S. Measuring acoustic complexity in continuously varying signals: how complex is a wolf howl? BIOACOUSTICS 2017. [DOI: 10.1080/09524622.2017.1317287] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/19/2022]
Affiliation(s)
| | - Éloïse C. Déaux
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
| | - Bilal Habib
- Department of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, India
| | - Brian Mitchell
- The Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA
| | - Vicente Palacios
- Instituto Cavanilles de Biodiversidad y Biología Evolutiva, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain
| | | | - Sara Waller
- Department of Philosophy, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA
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11
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Torre IG, Luque B, Lacasa L, Luque J, Hernández-Fernández A. Emergence of linguistic laws in human voice. Sci Rep 2017; 7:43862. [PMID: 28272418 PMCID: PMC5341060 DOI: 10.1038/srep43862] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/13/2016] [Accepted: 01/31/2017] [Indexed: 11/08/2022] Open
Abstract
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of statistical patterns of language in acoustics are biased by the arbitrary, language-dependent segmentation of the signal, and virtually precludes the possibility of making comparative studies between human voice and other animal communication systems. Here we bridge this gap by proposing a method that allows to measure such patterns in acoustic signals of arbitrary origin, without needs to have access to the language corpus underneath. The method has been applied to sixteen different human languages, recovering successfully some well-known laws of human communication at timescales even below the phoneme and finding yet another link between complexity and criticality in a biological system. These methods further pave the way for new comparative studies in animal communication or the analysis of signals of unknown code.
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Affiliation(s)
- Iván González Torre
- Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, EIAE, Technical University of Madrid, Plaza Cardenal Cisneros, 28040, Madrid, Spain
| | - Bartolo Luque
- Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, EIAE, Technical University of Madrid, Plaza Cardenal Cisneros, 28040, Madrid, Spain
- School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E14NS, London, UK
| | - Lucas Lacasa
- School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E14NS, London, UK
| | - Jordi Luque
- Telefonica Research, Edificio Telefonica-Diagonal 00, Barcelona, Spain
| | - Antoni Hernández-Fernández
- Complexity and Quantitative Linguistics Lab, Laboratory for Relational Algorithmics, Complexity and Learning (LARCA), Institut de Ciències de l’Educació, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
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Cadeddu A, Wylie EK, Jurczak J, Wampler-Doty M, Grzybowski BA. Organic Chemistry as a Language and the Implications of Chemical Linguistics for Structural and Retrosynthetic Analyses. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl 2014. [DOI: 10.1002/ange.201403708] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
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13
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Cadeddu A, Wylie EK, Jurczak J, Wampler-Doty M, Grzybowski BA. Organic chemistry as a language and the implications of chemical linguistics for structural and retrosynthetic analyses. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl 2014; 53:8108-12. [PMID: 25044611 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201403708] [Citation(s) in RCA: 46] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/26/2014] [Revised: 07/01/2014] [Indexed: 11/05/2022]
Abstract
Methods of computational linguistics are used to demonstrate that a natural language such as English and organic chemistry have the same structure in terms of the frequency of, respectively, text fragments and molecular fragments. This quantitative correspondence suggests that it is possible to extend the methods of computational corpus linguistics to the analysis of organic molecules. It is shown that within organic molecules bonds that have highest information content are the ones that 1) define repeat/symmetry subunits and 2) in asymmetric molecules, define the loci of potential retrosynthetic disconnections. Linguistics-based analysis appears well-suited to the analysis of complex structural and reactivity patterns within organic molecules.
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Affiliation(s)
- Andrea Cadeddu
- Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL 60208 (USA) http://dysa.northwestern.edu
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Complexity in Animal Communication: Estimating the Size of N-Gram Structures. ENTROPY 2014. [DOI: 10.3390/e16010526] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/16/2022]
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Lin TH, Chou LS, Akamatsu T, Chan HC, Chen CF. An automatic detection algorithm for extracting the representative frequency of cetacean tonal sounds. THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2013; 134:2477-85. [PMID: 23968045 DOI: 10.1121/1.4816572] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/23/2023]
Abstract
Most studies on tonal sounds extract contour parameters from fundamental frequencies. The presence of harmonics and the frequency distribution of multiple tonal sounds have not been well researched. To investigate the occurrence and frequency modulation of cetacean tonal sounds, the procedure of detecting the instantaneous frequency bandwidth of tonal spectral peaks was integrated within the local-max detector to extract adopted frequencies. The adopted frequencies, considered the representative frequencies of tonal sounds, are used to find the presence of harmonics and overlapping tonal sounds. The utility and detection performance are demonstrated on acoustic recordings of five species from two databases. The recordings of humpback dolphins showed a 75% detection rate with a 5% false detection rate, and recordings from the MobySound archive showed an 85% detection rate with a 5% false detection rate. These detections were achieved in signal-to-noise ratios of -12 to 21 dB. The parameters that measured the distribution of adopted frequency, as well as the prominence of harmonics and overlaps, indicate that the modulation of tonal sounds varied among different species and behaviors. This algorithm can be applied to studies on cetacean communication signals and long-term passive acoustic monitoring.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tzu-Hao Lin
- Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, National Taiwan University, Number 1, Section 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
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Kalankesh LR, Stevens R, Brass A. The language of gene ontology: a Zipf's law analysis. BMC Bioinformatics 2012; 13:127. [PMID: 22676436 PMCID: PMC3473240 DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-13-127] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/11/2011] [Accepted: 05/15/2012] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Most major genome projects and sequence databases provide a GO annotation of their data, either automatically or through human annotators, creating a large corpus of data written in the language of GO. Texts written in natural language show a statistical power law behaviour, Zipf's law, the exponent of which can provide useful information on the nature of the language being used. We have therefore explored the hypothesis that collections of GO annotations will show similar statistical behaviours to natural language. RESULTS Annotations from the Gene Ontology Annotation project were found to follow Zipf's law. Surprisingly, the measured power law exponents were consistently different between annotation captured using the three GO sub-ontologies in the corpora (function, process and component). On filtering the corpora using GO evidence codes we found that the value of the measured power law exponent responded in a predictable way as a function of the evidence codes used to support the annotation. CONCLUSIONS Techniques from computational linguistics can provide new insights into the annotation process. GO annotations show similar statistical behaviours to those seen in natural language with measured exponents that provide a signal which correlates with the nature of the evidence codes used to support the annotations, suggesting that the measured exponent might provide a signal regarding the information content of the annotation.
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18
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Semple S, Hsu MJ, Agoramoorthy G. Efficiency of coding in macaque vocal communication. Biol Lett 2010; 6:469-71. [PMID: 20106854 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.1062] [Citation(s) in RCA: 29] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/12/2022] Open
Abstract
A key characteristic of human language efficiency is that more frequently used words tend to be shorter in length-the 'law of brevity'. To date, no test of this relationship between frequency of use and length has been carried out on non-human animal vocal communication. We show here that the vocal repertoire of the Formosan macaque (Macaca cyclopis) conforms to the pattern predicted by the law of brevity, with an inverse relationship found between call duration and rate of utterance. This finding provides evidence for coding efficiency in the vocal communication system of this species, and indicates commonality in the basic structure of the coding system between human language and vocal communication in this non-human primate.
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Affiliation(s)
- Stuart Semple
- Centre for Research in Evolutionary Anthropology, Roehampton University, London, UK
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