Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2002. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 112 (2002): 728-739, doi:10.1121/1.1496079.
Description:
This paper presents a cross-sectional study testing whether dolphins that are born in aquarium pools where they hear trainers' whistles develop whistles that are less frequency modulated than those of wild dolphins. Ten pairs of captive and wild dolphins were matched for age and sex. Twenty whistles were sampled from each dolphin. Several traditional acoustic features (total duration, duration minus any silent periods, etc.) were measured for each whistle, in addition to newly defined flatness parameters: total flatness ratio (percentage of whistle scored as unmodulated), and contiguous flatness ratio (duration of longest flat segment divided by total duration). The durations of wild dolphin whistles were found to be significantly longer, and the captive dolphins had whistles that were less frequency modulated and more like the trainers' whistles. Using a standard t-test, the captive dolphin had a significantly higher total flatness ratio in 9/10 matched pairs, and in 8/10 pairs the captive dolphin had significantly higher contiguous flatness ratios. These results suggest that captive-born dolphins can incorporate features of artificial acoustic models made by humans into their signature whistles.
Description:
J.R.B. gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation Ocean Sciences CAREER Award 9733391. P.L.T. acknowledges the support of the Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-87-K-0236 and NIH Grant 5 R29 NS25290 for supporting the collection of the data used in this study and NIH Grant R01 DC04191 for support in preparation of the manuscript.
Keywords:
Acoustic field
;
Acoustic signal processing
;
Biocommunications
;
Speech
;
Acoustic variables measurement
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
