Do birds differentiate between white noise and deterministic chaos?

Blumstein, Daniel T.; Whitaker, Jessica; Kennen, Judith; Bryant, Gregory A.

doi:10.1111/eth.12702

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 37 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…Chaos is indeed a characteristic of calls associated with distress in a wide range of mammals [10,15,16,21,23] (this study). Additionally, at the perceptual level, Blumstein & Récapet [24] have shown that white noise (which shares some perceptual elements with deterministic chaos [50]) added to natural alarm calls of marmots induces potentially costly responses in these animals (reduced foraging activity). An earlier study also showed that chaos added to human nonverbal vocalizations increases the intensity of perceived negative, rather than positive, affective states [51].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonlinear vocal phenomena affect human perceptions of distress, size and dominance in puppy whines

et al. 2022

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While nonlinear phenomena (NLP) are widely reported in animal vocalizations, often causing perceptual harshness and roughness, their communicative function remains debated. Several hypotheses have been put forward: attention-grabbing, communication of distress, exaggeration of body size and dominance. Here, we use state-of-the-art sound synthesis to investigate how NLP affect the perception of puppy whines by human listeners. Listeners assessed the distress, size or dominance conveyed by synthetic puppy whines with manipulated NLP, including frequency jumps and varying proportions of subharmonics, sidebands and deterministic chaos. We found that the presence of chaos increased the puppy's perceived level of distress and that this effect held across a range of representative fundamental frequency ( f o ) levels. Adding sidebands and subharmonics also increased perceived distress among listeners who have extensive caregiving experience with pre-weaned puppies (e.g. breeders, veterinarians). Finally, we found that whines with added chaos, subharmonics or sidebands were associated with larger and more dominant puppies, although these biases were attenuated in experienced caregivers. Together, our results show that nonlinear phenomena in puppy whines can convey rich information to human listeners and therefore may be crucial for offspring survival during breeding of a domesticated species.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonlinear vocal phenomena affect human perceptions of distress, size and dominance in puppy whines

et al. 2022

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“…Second, future research could explore psychoacoustical sensitivity to vocal roughness, and how discrimination thresholds might shift as a function of low-level properties of the acoustic context. Additionally, error management principles could be at play as listeners might be biased to over-detect nonlinearbased roughness in cases of possible danger (Blumstein, Whitaker, Kennen, & Bryant, 2017). Finally, research could examine whether context effects exist with signals that are not conspecific vocalizations, such as other animals' vocalizations/calls or synthetic alarm signals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound context modulates perceived vocal emotion

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Ponsot

Bryant

et al. 2020

Behavioural Processes

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Many animal vocalizations contain nonlinear acoustic phenomena as a consequence of physiological arousal. In humans, nonlinear features are processed early in the auditory system, and are used to efficiently detect alarm calls and other urgent signals. Yet, high-level emotional and semantic contextual factors likely guide the perception and evaluation of roughness features in vocal sounds. Here we examined the relationship between perceived vocal arousal and auditory context. We presented listeners with nonverbal vocalizations (yells of a single vowel) at varying levels of portrayed vocal arousal, in two musical contexts (clean guitar, distorted guitar) and one non-musical context (modulated noise). As predicted, vocalizations with higher levels of portrayed vocal arousal were judged as more negative and more emotionally aroused than the same voices produced with low vocal arousal. Moreover, both the perceived valence and emotional arousal of vocalizations were significantly affected by both musical and non-musical contexts. These results show the importance of auditory context in judging emotional arousal and valence in voices and music, and suggest that nonlinear features in music are processed similarly to communicative vocal signals.

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“…To minimize the effects of pseudoreplication (Kroodsma 1989, McGregor et al 1992), we randomly selected stimulus files for each trial from a library of 60 songs (one song from 60 different individuals) (Table S2, 15 each of E. t. adastus , E. t. brewsteri , E. t. extimus , and E. t. traillii ). We used white noise (i.e., random noise with equal energy at all frequencies) as our control because it covers the frequency bandwidth of Willow Flycatcher song (~ 1–7 kHz, Mahoney et al 2020) and experiments have shown that birds respond similarly to white noise and heterospecific songs (Blumstein et al 2017) so it is a robust stimulus to use as a baseline for responses to playback. Most focal birds received all treatments on the same day ( N = 116 of 119), with at least 30 min between successive trials (Prescott 1987).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subspecies discrimination based on song structure by Willow Flycatchers

2021

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Animals use acoustic signals to repel competitors and attract mates, and signal divergence among populations can promote reproductive isolation. Empidonax flycatchers are insectivorous songbirds distributed across North and Central America that are conservative in plumage, but often exhibit differences in songs both among and within species. Four subspecies of Willow Flycatchers (Empidonax traillii) have been recognized and previous analyses have revealed differences in song structure among a subset of these subspecies. Using reciprocal playback experiments in the field, we tested for subspecific song discrimination among these four putative subspecies of Willow Flycatchers. We found that three subspecies (E. t. adastus, E. t. brewsteri, and E. t. traillii) responded similarly to their own songs and those of each other, but all three subspecies responded significantly less aggressively to songs of the southwestern subspecies (E. t. extimus). In contrast, the southwestern subspecies (E. t. extimus) responded significantly more aggressively to its own song than to those of the other three subspecies. Our results indicate that behavioral responses reflect differences in song structure among subspecies; subspecies responded more strongly to songs of subspecies with similar structures, less strongly to songs most different in structure, and the subspecies with the most distinctive song (E. t. extimus) responded less to songs of the other three subspecies. If responses of males to songs reflect relative reproductive compatibility within and among subspecies, songs may contribute to reproductive isolation of the four subspecies of Willow Flycatchers.

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Do birds differentiate between white noise and deterministic chaos?

Cited by 9 publications

References 37 publications

Nonlinear vocal phenomena affect human perceptions of distress, size and dominance in puppy whines

Nonlinear vocal phenomena affect human perceptions of distress, size and dominance in puppy whines

Sound context modulates perceived vocal emotion

Subspecies discrimination based on song structure by Willow Flycatchers

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