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** The Music and Science list is managed by the Institute of Musical Research (www.music.sas.ac.uk) as a bulletin board and discussion forum for researchers working at the shared boundaries of science and music. ** MESSAGE FOLLOWS: Dear all, Next Wednesday 30 March, at 3:30pm, Vivek Nityananda will present the seminar 'Animal Acoustic Communication in Noisy Social Environments'. The seminar will take place in room 105 in the Electronic Engineering building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS. The Electronic Engineering building can be accessed using the glass entrance from Mile End Road, which is located next to the bus stop 'Queen Mary, University of London' (buses 25, 205). The room is under access control, so people from outside QM will need to contact C4DM to get in - the lab phone number is +44 (0)20 7882 7480 and if I'm not available, anyone else in the lab should be able to help. If you are coming from outside Queen Mary, please let me know, so I can make sure no-one's stuck outside the doors. Details of future seminars can be found at http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/newsevents/researchgroupevents.php?i=12. If you wish to be added to / removed from our mailing list, please send me an email and I'll be happy to do so. *Wednesday's seminar (30 March, 3:30pm):* Title: */Animal Acoustic Communication in Noisy Social Environments/* Speaker: *Vivek Nityananda (Queen Mary, University of London)* Abstract: Several animals communicate in large groups with multiple individuals. Hearing individual voices or calls in such groups is a difficult problem which each of these animals - frogs in a chorus, penguins in a breeding colony, humans at a party - manage to solve in order to communicate. A large body of work has investigated the acoustic and spatial cues that humans use to distinguish individual sources of sounds and solve this so-called 'cocktail party problem'. We, however, know very little about how other animals manage to achieve the same in their acoustic environments. Using a series of acoustic playback experiments, we investigated how Cope's gray tree frog (Hyla chrysoscelis) segregates sources of sound in its environment. In this talk, I present results from these experiments and discuss how both spatial and frequency cues help treefrogs hear in their natural acoustic environments. Bio: Dr. Vivek Nityananda completed his Ph.D. at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. His doctoral work focused on the sensory ecology of acoustic communication in bushcrickets. He has since worked on frog hearing at the University of Minnesota and is currently working at the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary on a Human Frontiers in Science postdoctoral research grant. The focus of his current research is visual search and attention in bumblebees. Emmanouil Benetos -- Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science Queen Mary, University of London [log in to unmask] Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 7480 Fax: +44 (0)20 7882 7997 C4DM Web-site : http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/index.html