Generation, Coordination, and Evolution of Neural Circuits for Vocal Communication.

In many species, vocal communication is essential for coordinating social behaviors including courtship, mating, parenting, rivalry, and alarm signaling. Effective communication requires accurate production, detection, and classification of signals, as well as selection of socially appropriate responses. Understanding how signals are generated and how acoustic signals are perceived is key to understanding the neurobiology of social behaviors.

Probing forebrain to hindbrain circuit functions in Xenopus.

The vertebrate hindbrain includes neural circuits that govern essential functions including breathing, blood pressure and heart rate. Hindbrain circuits also participate in generating rhythmic motor patterns for vocalization. In most tetrapods, sound production is powered by expiration and the circuitry underlying vocalization and respiration must be linked.

Acoustic structure of the five perceptual dimensions of timbre in orchestral instrument tones.

Attempts to relate the perceptual dimensions of timbre to quantitative acoustical dimensions have been tenuous, leading to claims that timbre is an emergent property, if measurable at all. Here, a three-pronged analysis shows that the timbre space of sustained instrument tones occupies 5 dimensions and that a specific combination of acoustic properties uniquely determines gestalt perception of timbre. Firstly, multidimensional scaling (MDS) of dissimilarity judgments generated a perceptual timbre space in which 5 dimensions were cross-validated and selected by traditional model comparisons.

Temporally selective processing of communication signals by auditory midbrain neurons.

Perception of the temporal structure of acoustic signals contributes critically to vocal signaling. In the aquatic clawed frog Xenopus laevis, calls differ primarily in the temporal parameter of click rate, which conveys sexual identity and reproductive state. We show here that an ensemble of auditory neurons in the laminar nucleus of the torus semicircularis (TS) of X.

The modulation transfer function for speech intelligibility.

We systematically determined which spectrotemporal modulations in speech are necessary for comprehension by human listeners. Speech comprehension has been shown to be robust to spectral and temporal degradations, but the specific relevance of particular degradations is arguable due to the complexity of the joint spectral and temporal information in the speech signal. We applied a novel modulation filtering technique to recorded sentences to restrict acoustic information quantitatively and to obtain a joint spectrotemporal modulation transfer function for speech comprehension, the speech MTF.

Tone and call responses of units in the auditory nerve and dorsal medullary nucleus of Xenopus laevis.

The clawed frog Xenopus laevis produces vocalizations consisting of distinct patterns of clicks. This study provides the first description of spontaneous, pure-tone and communication-signal evoked discharge properties of auditory nerve (n.VIII) fibers and dorsal medullary nucleus (DMN) cells in an obligatorily aquatic anuran.

Male discrimination of receptive and unreceptive female calls by temporal features.

In murky, crowded ponds in South Africa, female clawed frogs, Xenopus laevis (Daudin), vocalize to signal reproductive state. Female calls consist of acoustically similar clicks delivered in trains with characteristic rates. The rapping call of a sexually receptive female has a more rapid click rate [81 ms mean interclick interval (ICI)] than the ticking call of an unreceptive female (219 ms ICI).