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The Analysis and Interpretation of Animal Vocalisations
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The Analysis and Interpretation of Animal Vocalisations

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Acoustics and Vibrations".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 November 2023) | Viewed by 9676

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Robert Eklund

E-Mail Website1 Website2
Guest Editor
Department of Culture and Society (IKOS), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Interests: acoustic/phonetic analysis; felid vocalisations; human kulning (cattle calls) and overtone singing; ingressive phonation in humans and animals
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Roger K. Moore

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 4DP, UK
Interests: spoken language processing; vocal interactivity in-and-between humans, animals and robots
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

It is often assumed that only human beings enjoy the benefit of a rich and expressive communication system in the form of spoken language. Animals also vocalise, and some have extensive repertoires, but what are they saying? Are animals simply advertising their presence, defending their territory or warning of predators, or are they engaging in conversations that are outside the comprehension of other species?  What is clear is that animals signal their mental states, both to themselves and to others, and that because acoustic signals are manifest in a public space, they are available both within and across species. How are such signals managed and exploited, then? What conditions do particular sounds use, what are the acoustic characteristics of these sounds, and to what extent are paralinguistic states common across species? These are critical questions that are being addressed by the scientific community, and this Special Issue aims to bring together our latest understanding of the function and purpose of animal vocalisations and their relation (if any) with human spoken language.

Potential authors are encouraged to submit original research papers that describe emerging approaches in the study of animal vocalisations, review papers that capture the state of the art, and position papers that provide theoretical insights and identify outstanding research issues. Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

  • The relationship between human language and the different signalling systems employed by non-human animals;
  • Acoustic characteristics of animal vocalisations and the relationship between such characteristics and hearing and habitat/sound propagation;
  • The degree to which there is a contrastic phonological structure to animal vocalisation;
  • Measurement of the complexity of vocal interactions;
  • The mental representations associated with vocalisations;
  • Methodological issues with respect to cross-species annotation;
  • Animal vocalisations as codes/ciphers;
  • The rhythmic substrate to vocalisation and links to music;
  • The role of feedback in the management and structure of vocalisation; 
  • Cross-individual and cross-species vocal learning.

Prof. Dr. Robert Eklund
Prof. Dr. Roger Moore
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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15 pages, 1784 KiB  
Article
Acoustic Detection of Vaccine Reactions in Hens for Assessing Anti-Inflammatory Product Efficacy
by Gerardo José Ginovart-Panisello, Ignasi Iriondo, Tesa Panisello Monjo, Silvia Riva, Jordi Casadó Cancer and Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès
Appl. Sci. 2024, 14(5), 2156; https://doi.org/10.3390/app14052156 - 5 Mar 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1101
Abstract
Acoustic studies on poultry show that chicken vocalizations can be a real-time indicator of the health conditions of the birds and can improve animal welfare and farm management. In this study, hens vaccinated against infectious laryngotracheitis (ILT) were acoustically recorded for 3 days [...] Read more.
Acoustic studies on poultry show that chicken vocalizations can be a real-time indicator of the health conditions of the birds and can improve animal welfare and farm management. In this study, hens vaccinated against infectious laryngotracheitis (ILT) were acoustically recorded for 3 days before vaccine administration (pre-reaction period) and also from vaccination onwards, with the first 5 days being identified as the “reaction period” and the 5 following days as “post reaction”. The raw audio was pre-processed to isolate hen calls and the 13 Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients; then, the spectral centroid and the number of vocalizations were extracted to build the acoustic dataset. The experiment was carried out on the same farm but in two different houses. The hens from one house were assigned to the control group, without administration of the anti-inflammatory product, and the other formed the treatment group. Both acoustic data sets were recorded and processed in the same way. The control group was used to acoustically model the animal reaction to the vaccine and we automatically detected the hens’ vaccine reactions and side effects through acoustics. From Scikit-Learn algorithms, Gaussian Naive Bayes was the best performing model, with a balanced accuracy of 80% for modeling the reactions and non-reactions caused by ILT in the control group. Furthermore, the importance of algorithm permutation highlighted that the centroid and MFCC4 were the most important features in acoustically detecting the ILT vaccine reaction. The fitted Gaussian Naive Bayes model allowed us to evaluate the treatment group to determine if the vocalizations after vaccine administration were detected as non-reactions, due to the anti-inflammatory product’s effectiveness. Of the sample, 99% of vocalizations were classified as non-reactions, due to the anti-inflammatory properties of the product, which reduced vaccine reactions and side effects. The non-invasive detection of hens’ responses to vaccination to prevent respiratory problems in hens described in this paper is an innovative method of measuring and detecting avian welfare. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Analysis and Interpretation of Animal Vocalisations)
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14 pages, 10918 KiB  
Article
Trend and Representativeness of Acoustic Features of Broiler Chicken Vocalisations Related to CO2
by Gerardo José Ginovart-Panisello, Ignasi Iriondo Sanz, Tesa Panisello Monjo, Silvia Riva, Tomas Garriga Dicuzzo, Eva Abancens Escuer and Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12(20), 10480; https://doi.org/10.3390/app122010480 - 17 Oct 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1620
Abstract
The concentration of CO2 is relatively large in poultry farms and high accumulations of this gas reduce animal welfare. Good control of its concentration is crucial for the health of the animals. The vocalizations of the chickens can show their level of [...] Read more.
The concentration of CO2 is relatively large in poultry farms and high accumulations of this gas reduce animal welfare. Good control of its concentration is crucial for the health of the animals. The vocalizations of the chickens can show their level of well-being linked to the presence of carbon dioxide. An audio recording system was implemented and audio raw data was processed to extract acoustical features from four cycles of forty days, three of them from the same farm. This research aims to find the most relevant acoustic features extracted from the broiler’s calls that are related to the CO2 concentration and that could help to automate procedures. The results are encouraging since MFCC 6, 9, 4 and 3 are the most important features that relate the vocalizations of the chickens to the gas concentration, furthermore there is a clear and more similar representativeness trend during birds’ life period from day 15 to day 40. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Analysis and Interpretation of Animal Vocalisations)
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Review

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22 pages, 2333 KiB  
Review
A Collection of Best Practices for the Collection and Analysis of Bioacoustic Data
by Julie N. Oswald, Amy M. Van Cise, Angela Dassow, Taffeta Elliott, Michael T. Johnson, Andrea Ravignani and Jeffrey Podos
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12(23), 12046; https://doi.org/10.3390/app122312046 - 25 Nov 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 5202
Abstract
The field of bioacoustics is rapidly developing and characterized by diverse methodologies, approaches and aims. For instance, bioacoustics encompasses studies on the perception of pure tones in meticulously controlled laboratory settings, documentation of species’ presence and activities using recordings from the field, and [...] Read more.
The field of bioacoustics is rapidly developing and characterized by diverse methodologies, approaches and aims. For instance, bioacoustics encompasses studies on the perception of pure tones in meticulously controlled laboratory settings, documentation of species’ presence and activities using recordings from the field, and analyses of circadian calling patterns in animal choruses. Newcomers to the field are confronted with a vast and fragmented literature, and a lack of accessible reference papers or textbooks. In this paper we contribute towards filling this gap. Instead of a classical list of “dos” and “don’ts”, we review some key papers which, we believe, embody best practices in several bioacoustic subfields. In the first three case studies, we discuss how bioacoustics can help identify the ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘how many’ of animals within a given ecosystem. Specifically, we review cases in which bioacoustic methods have been applied with success to draw inferences regarding species identification, population structure, and biodiversity. In fourth and fifth case studies, we highlight how structural properties in signal evolution can emerge via ecological constraints or cultural transmission. Finally, in a sixth example, we discuss acoustic methods that have been used to infer predator–prey dynamics in cases where direct observation was not feasible. Across all these examples, we emphasize the importance of appropriate recording parameters and experimental design. We conclude by highlighting common best practices across studies as well as caveats about our own overview. We hope our efforts spur a more general effort in standardizing best practices across the subareas we’ve highlighted in order to increase compatibility among bioacoustic studies and inspire cross-pollination across the discipline. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Analysis and Interpretation of Animal Vocalisations)
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