As a followup of our work on audio feature generation and classification, we have become interested in animal audio communication.
The initial idea was to test whether our techniques developped for music applications would also fit with animal vocalizations. We have shown (together with the team of Csaba Molnar) that feature generation could improve dog bark classification to reach performance that exceed the performance of human experts.
This work led to the study of other animals, such as parrots and canaries. Now we are interested in establishing complete close-loop audio interactions between an animal and an artificial system. The goal of such a study is twofold. First, we want to trigger interactions and behaviors that are otherwise difficult if not impossible to observe. These behavior can help ethologists to understand animal behavior and cognition. The second goal is to study the mechanisms of reflexive interaction in non human species.
Canary and Computer: Single Calls
The computer replies to canary with vocalisations of the same type ( “Single Calls”). The canary produces a lot of “Single Calls”, and every Computer call is shortly followed by a Canary Call, demonstrating that “Single Calls” are contact calls.
Canary and Computer: Repated Calls
Demonstrated hypothesis: repeated Calls are alarm calls. When canary produces single calls, computer replies with Repeated Calls (Trills).The canary produces much less calls and acts nervously.