Topic: acoustic features

Many complex behaviors involve sequences of basic motor or vocal elements governed by syntactic rules, which facilitate flexible and adaptive actions. Songbirds that crystallize their repertoire of vocal syllables and syllable-to-syllable transitions allow researchers to build probabilistic models of syntax rules, providing insight into underlying neural mechanisms. However, in many complex behaviors, syntax rules change over time, such as during learning or in response to new environmental and social contexts. Here, we investigated the songs of canaries, a seasonal songbird. Canaries learn a

Humans possess the remarkable ability to extract discrete words and construct meaningful sentences from continuous streams of acoustic signals. While brain regions such as the superior temporal gyrus (STG) are known to be involved in speech recognition, how populations of neurons coordinate to enable this process remains unclear. Similar to the brain, state-of-the-art models like Whisper [1] excel at speech processing by transforming acoustic inputs into high-dimensional representations. Such models can thus be valuable tools for studying the neural mechanisms underlying speech perception. In

Humans, dolphins, and elephants are the only known species that vocally label their conspecifics. It remains unclear whether nonhuman primates share this ability. By recording hundreds of spontaneous “phee-call” dialogues between pairs of marmoset monkeys we discovered that marmosets use these calls to vocally label their conspecifics. Moreover, by using closed-loop playback experiments we found that they respond more consistently and correctly to calls that are specifically directed at them. Analysis of calls from multiple monkeys revealed that family members use similar calls and acoustic fe