Animal Voice Research Articles

Rehabilitating the world’s worst sounds: Time-frequency reassignment in sound modeling and morphing

Sound morphing implies a gradual transformation from one sound to another, or the transfer of features of one sound to another. Morphing has been used to synthesize the voices of aliens and animals and a wide variety of sound effects in films and popular music. Additive sound models provide a flexible medium for performing sound morphing and manipulation. The application of time-frequency reassignment—the computation of precise, signal-dependent loci for time-frequency analysis data from first-order partial derivatives of short-time spectral phase—to the construction of robust, manipulable additive sound models will be discussed, and the advantages afforded by the increased precision of reassigned sound models will be demonstrated. Machines, mammals, and musical instruments will be morphed and manipulated, and an attempt will be made to rehabilitate the very worst sounds in the world.

Through animal eyes: What behaviour tells us

To Charles Darwin, it was obvious that animals are sentient, so why should the idea not be now universally accepted? I review the difficulties and issues with animal sentience with a view to answering some of the critics. Sentience is ‘the hard problem’ and it is important we acknowledge the difficulties and do not claim too much for the evidence we have. Two sorts of evidence are examined: evidence from animal cognition and evidence from animal emotion, including the ways we now have of ‘asking’ animals what they want, behaviour, brain imaging and parallels with our own emotions.Despite the problems, the study of animal sentience is one of the most important areas of biology. Although conclusive evidence that animals are sentient may elude us, evidence of what they want and how they see the world is increasingly open to us and it is important that it is used. There is a danger that well-meaning people define animal welfare in terms of what they think animals want or what pleases them. But if we take animal sentience seriously, we must ensure that the animal voice is heard.

The Level of Reaction Time Determines the ERP Correlates of Auditory Negative Priming

Responding to a stimulus that had to be ignored previously is usually slowed-down (negative priming effect). This study investigates the reaction time and ERP effects of the negative priming phenomenon in the auditory domain. Thirty participants had to categorize sounds as musical instruments or animal voices. Reaction times were slowed-down in the negative priming condition relative to two control conditions. This effect was stronger for slow reactions (above intraindividual median) than for fast reactions (below intraindividual median). ERP analysis revealed a parietally located negativity of the negative priming condition compared to the control conditions between 550-730 ms poststimulus. This replicates the findings of Mayr, Niedeggen, Buchner, and Pietrowsky (2003) . The ERP correlate was more pronounced for slow trials (above intraindividual median) than for fast trials (below intraindividual median). The dependency of the negative priming effect size on the reaction time level found in the reaction time analysis as well as in the ERP analysis is consistent with both the inhibition as well as the episodic retrieval account of negative priming. A methodological artifact explanation of this effect-size dependency is discussed and discarded.

Finger puppets with sounds

A finger puppet toy sits comfortably on a finger of a child, and generates a sound when the finger is tapped against a hard object, such as a desk or a table-top. The sound may be a voice, an animal sound, an animal voice sound, a musical note, or any of the above sounds in the key of a musical note. The head of the puppet toy articulates about a shaft when the child articulates the finger, and the head may thus appear to move while the sound is generated. Multiple toys worn on one or more hands and having different musical notes may be tapped in sequence to play a melody.

Dionysus (review)

This review should be written in dramatic verse. No ordinary prose can capture the emotional resonance the Suzuki Company brings to the stage under the direction of legendary theorist and actor-trainer Tadashi Suzuki. This performance achieves such an intensity of contact between performer and spectator that for seventy precious minutes, hearts do more than beat—they vibrate, they thrum in unison with the actors' voices on stage, animal voices, with roots in the earth, offering up baleful warning and ancient woe.

“Animals under man”? Margaret Gatty's parables from nature

Margaret Gatty'sParables from Nature(1855–71) use the form of the moral tale for children to conduct a polemic against Tennysonian doubt, cleverly deploying the voices of talking animals and plants. The perspectives of animals, plants and children are valorised above those of arrogant male doubters. When this happens, the ironies Gatty uses can escape control, and lead to more subversive readings than the overt message, overturning the conventional hierarchies she has set up. The voices of the marginalised take over the centre, and comic inversion privileges the unprivileged, in a carnivalesque celebration of possibilities that terrify Tennyson, rather than the orthodox rebuttal of doubt called for by the feminine role. The article revalues Gatty's “feminine” and “animal's-eye” take on the problems about the natural world that exercise Tennyson and other canonical male writers, including Darwin and Hardy.

“Animals under man”? margaret gatty's parables from nature

Margaret Gatty’s Parables from Nature (1855-71) use the form of the moral tale for children to conduct a polemic against Tennysonian doubt, cleverly deploying the voices of talking animals and plants. The perspectives of animals, plants and children are valorised above those of arrogant male doubters. When this happens, the ironies Gatty uses can escape control, and lead to more subversive readings than the overt message, overturning the conventional hierarchies she has set up. The voices of the marginalised take over the centre, and comic inversion privileges the unprivileged, in a carnivalesque celebration of possibilities that terrify Tennyson, rather than the orthodox rebuttal of doubt called for by the feminine role. The article revalues Gatty’s 'feminine' and ‘animal’s-eye’ take on the problems about the natural world that exercise Tennyson and other canonical male writers, including Darwin and Hardy.

Selection and Validation of Oral Materials for Children's Literature: Artistic Resources in Chinua Achebe's Fiction for Children

Folktales are rich and authentic sources of raw African values in traditional African societies. In past times, they were used for purposes of acculturation and were, therefore, necessarily didactic and morality-laden. Children generally grew up under the tutelage of their mothers, who at chosen times during the formative years, told them folktales in which enshrined community values were explicitly extolled. Such occasions served as pastimes, and to sustain the interest and curiosity of the children, the raconteur must make the story real and entertaining and the experience worthwhile. She would embellish the tales, sing interesting songs or refrains, mimic voices of animals, birds and ghosts, perform acts, improvise lavishly, add humor, induce audience participation, and vary her narrative devices and methods constantly for maximum effects. Some of the values espoused were direct, blunt and uncoated, the narrator often using a particular story to reinforce a moral issue of the moment. Some stories advocated instant justice through revenge or retaliation for an evil act, or the deployment of a deus ex machina who kills off miscreants and hardened criminals. Good must invariably prevail over evil, and right over wrong. Wit and cunning (the sharp use of common sense) must excel over brute force and abusive might. Hard work must yield good results and be rewarded. Honesty always paid off. Falsehood and fraud were anti-social behaviors and must never escape severe punishments. Corruption in any form or manner was strictly frowned upon and the soul that sinned died instantly, to serve as a deterrent to others.

Applications of a high-quality sound manipulation algorithm s t r a i g h t for animal voices

Applications of a high-quality speech analysis/modification/synthesis algorithm [Kawahara et al., Speech Commun. 27, 187–207] for animal voices are discussed. The proposed algorithm consists of (1) F0 adaptive spectral smoothing to eliminate periodic interferences on a time-frequency representation, (2) F0 and source information extractor based on a fixed point analysis of mapping from frequency to instantaneous frequency, and (3) group delay manipulation to control temporal structure of an excitation source. Each component has to be tuned to specifications of animal voices to take full advantage of the method. There are two types of applications: The first method is converting animal voices to sound more like human speech: This modification tries to enhance the researcher’s auditory inspection of animal voices by mapping their voice physical parameters onto a region which is ecologically valid for humans. The second method is manipulating specific parameters of an animal voice to test function/contribution of each physical parameter: This modification tries to keep the naturalness of the stimuli while keeping a high degree of control accuracy of specific physical parameters of stimuli. This strategy would enable measurements of behavior responses in the vicinity of natural stimulus conditions.

Method to produce an animal’s voice to embellish a music and a device to practice this method

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Perceptual Aspects of Art for the Blind

ness closely resembles that of the sounds of music. Musical sounds are pure dynamics, pure expression. Vision tells us that music is produced by sound-makers, but the music itself contains no such instruments. Music exemplifies the abstractness of the auditory world quite in general. The auditory world is limited to the activity of things, the voices of humans and animals, the noises of water and wind, the cracking and banging and whistling of materials manipulated by nature and humans. Therefore, as I mentioned, the auditory world is empty, reduced to ocThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.180 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:32:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Art for the Blind 59 casional, mostly discontinuous signals. Whereas the visual world makes its presence constantly known and offers attractive targets and lures, sound appeals less to elementary attention. Fraiberg observes that the creeping of infants is motivated essentially by visual targets, things they want to reach, and that therefore children born blind will not creep unless they are given special incentives. Combine the auditory experiences, on which the blind so heavily depend for their knowledge of the outside, with the kinesthetic percepts reporting about the behavior of the body, and you get the sense of a thoroughly dynamic world, a world limited abstractly to action. But how about the equally indispensable knowledge of the objects performing the actions? The sense of touch, which informs sightless persons about the shape of things, does its work also in an entirely dynamic fashion. Touch lacks the abstractness of kinesthetic experience. It is geared to apprehending the presence of objects within bodily reach and to discovering their location, size, and shape. At the same time, however, its conscious dependence on the body hampers the kind of detachment from the self prompted by vision. To understand the difference between the self and the outer world is the primary task of human cognition. This achievement is necessarily delayed in the blind person because of the intimate haptic connection between the perceiver's own body and the objects perceived by touch. The central position of the self, which in visual perception is counteracted by the direct awareness of an outer world organized around centers of its own, is much less contested in haptic experience. The body of the perceiver occupies the largest space in the narrow territory of tactile reach. The body is constantly alive with the network of tensions that keeps its activity present in consciousness, whereas the outer objects transmit no such kinesthetic aliveness. Even so, the perceiver's self and the things it can touch are closely connected. From the base of the self's body, arm and hand reach unmistakably outward toward the object to be conquered. And while the exploration supplies knowledge about the objective dimensions of the physical things under scrutiny, the gestural operations by which the information is obtained preserve their dynamic abstractness of reaching, searching, meeting, pressing, embracing, etc. Consequently, the properties of the haptically explored objects are perceived in an equally dynamic fashion. The hands moving toward, say, a clay vessel standing on the table are met first of all by an active resistance, an obstacle that blocks the path of the exploration. The belly of the vessel bulges forward and outward. As the fingers grip the neck and converge around it, they experience it as an active constriction, which then reverts into the gaping aperture on top. Such dynamic perception is not alien to the sense of vision either,2 but it is much more compelling when the haptic senThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.180 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:32:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

RECENT ORNITHOLOGICAL PUBLICATIONS

RECENT ORNITHOLOGICAL PUBLICATIONS

The Voices of Animals

The Voices of Animals