Question: “Can we build systems that interact meaningfully with animals ?”

As a followup of our work on audio feature generation and classification, we have become interested in animal audio communication. The initial idea was to test whether our techniques developped for music applications would also fit with animal vocalizations. We have shown (together with the team of Csaba Molnar) that feature generation could improve dog bark classification to reach performance that exceed the performance of human experts. This work led to the stuy of other animals, such as parrots and canaries. Now we are interested in establishing complete close-loop audio interactions between an animal and an artificial system. The goal of such a study is twofold. First, we want to trigger interactions and behaviors that are otherwise difficult if not impossible to observe. These behavior can help ethologists to understand animal behavior and cognition.. The second goal is to study the mechanisms of reflexive interaction in non human species to study the relationships between perception and action.

Selected papers:

Skandrani, Z. Mise en place d’interactions acoustiques chez les canaris. Juin 2009. Rapport de stage effectué au Laboratoire d’Ethologie et Cognition Comparées, Université Paris Ouest - Nanterre La Défense / Sony

Giret, N., Roy, P., Albert, A., Pachet, F., Kreutzer, M. and Bovet, D. Evolving Acoustic Features for Parrot Vocalizations. submitted, 2009.

Molnár, Csaba, Kaplan, Frédéric, Roy, Pierre, Pachet, Francois, Pongrácz, Péter, Dóka, Antal and Miklósi, Ádám Classification of dog barks: a machine learning approach. Animal Cognition, 11(3):389-400 2008.

Al Ain, S., Giret, N., Roy, P., Pachet, F., Kreutzer, M. and Bovet, D. Different Acoustic Analysis Methods Yield Different Results. Vocal communication in birds and Mammals, St Andrews, Scotland, July 2008.

References

Al Ain, S., Giret, N., Roy, P., Pachet, F., Kreutzer, M. and Bovet, D. Different Acoustic Analysis Methods Yield Different Results. Vocal communication in birds and Mammals, St Andrews, Scotland, July 2008.

Giret, N., Roy, P., Albert, A., Pachet, F., Kreutzer, M. and Bovet, D. Finding Good Acoustic Features for Parrot Vocalizations: the Feature Generation Approach. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(2):1089-1099 February 2011.

Skandrani, Z. Mise en place d'interactions acoustiques chez les canaris. Juin 2009. Rapport de stage effectué au Laboratoire d'Ethologie et Cognition Comparées, Université Paris Ouest - Nanterre La Défense / Sony

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Music.