Pinpointing the position of flying songbirds with a wireless microphone array: three-dimensional triangulation of warblers on the wing

Gayk, Zach G.; Mennill, Daniel J.

doi:10.1080/09524622.2019.1609376

Cited by 14 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…As noted earlier, a high proportion of known play vocalisations are very quiet, so it is a certainty that many species generate these signals but the behaviour has not been documented in the scientific literature. Fortunately, technology is improving and wireless audio recording possibilities are increasing (e.g., Gayk and Mennill 2020). Additionally, sensing technologies developed for animal welfare (for reviews see Jukan et al 2017;Neethirajan 2017) could be potentially adapted as a means of gathering continuous emotional and behavioural data for a more comprehensive approach to a variety of communication phenomena, including play signals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review

Winkler

Bryant

2021

Bioacoustics

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Complex social play is well-documented across many animals. During play, animals often use signals that facilitate beneficial interactions and reduce potential costs, such as escalation to aggression. Although greater focus has been given to visual play signals, here we demonstrate that vocalisations constitute a widespread mode of play signalling across species. Our review indicates that vocal play signals are usually inconspicuous, although loud vocalisations, which suggest a broadcast function, are present in humans and some other species. Spontaneous laughter in humans shares acoustic and functional characteristics with play vocalisations across many species, but most notably with other great apes. Play vocalisations in primates and other mammals often include sounds of panting, supporting the theory that human laughter evolved from an auditory cue of laboured breathing during play. Human social complexity allowed laughter to evolve from a play-specific vocalisation into a sophisticated pragmatic signal that interacts with a large suite of other multimodal social behaviours in both intragroup and intergroup contexts. This review provides a foundation for detailed comparative analyses of play vocalisations across diverse taxa, which can shed light on the form and function of human laughter and, in turn, help us better understand the evolution of human social interaction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review

Winkler

Bryant

2021

Bioacoustics

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“…There have been some approaches for 3D bird song localization (Harlow et al 2013;Stepanian et al 2016;Gabriel et al 2018;Gayk and Mennill 2019). Recently, Gayk and Mennill (2019) recently developed a system based on time-of-arrival dierences and composed of multiple and wireless and ARU units with a height of about 7 m for three-dimensional triangulation of flying warblers on the wing. This implies the potential of extending our framework to 3D localization of flying birds with smaller systems based on 3D DOA estimation with HARK.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2016; Gabriel et al. 2018; Gayk and Mennill 2019). Recently, Gayk and Mennill (2019) recently developed a system based on time‐of‐arrival dierences and composed of multiple and wireless and ARU units with a height of about 7 m for three‐dimensional triangulation of flying warblers on the wing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There have been various studies on using microphone arrays to localize bird vocalizations because the spatial position of vocalizations has been recognized as an important information in both bioacoustics and ecoacoustics (Mennill et al 2006(Mennill et al , 2012Collier et al 2010;Harlow et al 2013;Stepanian et al 2016;Araya-Salas et al 2017;Gayk and Mennill 2019). Hedley et al (2017) discussed that the direction of arrivals (DOA) estimation using a microphone array may improve the ability to assess abundance in biodiversity surveys by facilitating more accurate localization of sounds.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fine‐scale observations of spatio‐spectro‐temporal dynamics of bird vocalizations using robot audition techniques

Sumitani

Suzuki

Matsubayashi

et al. 2020

Remote Sens Ecol Conserv

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Ecoacoustics needs sophisticated acoustic monitoring tools to extract a wide level of features from an observed mixture of sounds. We have developed a portable acoustic monitoring system called 'HARKBird' which consists of a laptop PC and an inexpensive commercial microphone array with the robot audition software HARK. HARKBird can extract acoustic events in a recording, and we can obtain the begin and end timings, the spatial information (e.g., position or direction from the microphone array), and the spectrogram of the sound separated from the original recording. In this study, we report how robot audition techniques contribute to monitoring spatio-spectro-temporal dynamics of bird behaviors, using an extended and minimal system based on multiple microphone arrays. The dimension reduction of separated sounds is important to integrate the information from multiple microphone arrays. As a dimension reduction algorithm, we use t-SNE to help manual annotation of each sound and to generate the vocalization distribution automatically. We conduct playback experiments to Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus) to simulate different cases of territorial intrusions (song/call/no playback). Our hypothesis in playback experiments is that playback of conspecific vocalizations would invoke aggressive responses of males against song playbacks and the effects would be more prominent than those of call playbacks. Our primary aim is to test whether our system can extract the necessary information on the aggressiveness of target individuals to examine our hypothesis. We show the system with manual annotation of vocalizations can extract their different spatio-spectro-temporal dynamics in different conditions, which supported our hypothesis. We also consider the spectral affinity-based automatic matching of localized sounds from different microphone arrays. The relative number of localized songs depending on the playback conditions reflected a similar trend to those in the manual approach, implying that we can grasp the long-term dynamics of vocalizations without costly annotations.

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“…There have been several empirical studies to spatially localize or estimating the direction of arrival (DOA) bird songs using multiple microphones. Gayk and Mennill successfully estimated the position of the vocalizations of warblers on the wing using three-dimensional triangulation based on 8 microphones [11]. Mennill et al conducted playback experiments to examine the accuracy of two-dimensional localization based on an array made up of four stereo recorders [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-Invasive Monitoring of the Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Vocalizations among Songbirds in a Semi Free-Flight Environment Using Robot Audition Techniques

Sumitani

Suzuki

Arita

et al. 2021

Birds

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To understand the social interactions among songbirds, extracting the timing, position, and acoustic properties of their vocalizations is essential. We propose a framework for automatic and fine-scale extraction of spatial-spectral-temporal patterns of bird vocalizations in a densely populated environment. For this purpose, we used robot audition techniques to integrate information (i.e., the timing, direction of arrival, and separated sound of localized sources) from multiple microphone arrays (array of arrays) deployed in an environment, which is non-invasive. As a proof of concept of this framework, we examined the ability of the method to extract active vocalizations of multiple Zebra Finches in an outdoor mesh tent as a realistic situation in which they could fly and vocalize freely. We found that localization results of vocalizations reflected the arrangements of landmark spots in the environment such as nests or perches and some vocalizations were localized at non-landmark positions. We also classified their vocalizations as either songs or calls by using a simple method based on the tempo and length of the separated sounds, as an example of the use of the information obtained from the framework. Our proposed approach has great potential to understand their social interactions and the semantics or functions of their vocalizations considering the spatial relationships, although detailed understanding of the interaction would require analysis of more long-term recordings.

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Pinpointing the position of flying songbirds with a wireless microphone array: three-dimensional triangulation of warblers on the wing

Cited by 14 publications

References 23 publications

Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review

Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review

Fine‐scale observations of spatio‐spectro‐temporal dynamics of bird vocalizations using robot audition techniques

Non-Invasive Monitoring of the Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Vocalizations among Songbirds in a Semi Free-Flight Environment Using Robot Audition Techniques

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