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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
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Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 7480
Fax: +44 (0)20 7882 7997
C4DM Web-site : http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/index.html