ArticleScientific reports2016
A study of vocal nonlinearities in humpback whale songs: from production mechanisms to acoustic analysis.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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24 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Vocal characteristics of distress and reproductive vocalizations in North American wapiti.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Rough is salient: a conserved vocal niche to hijack the brain's salience system.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Vocal communication and perception of pain in childbirth vocalizations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Exploring nonlinear phenomena in animal vocalizations through oscillator theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- How to analyse and manipulate nonlinear phenomena in voice recordings.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Vocal registers expand signal diversity in vertebrate vocal communication.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Nonlinear phenomena in mammalian vocal communication: an introduction and scoping review.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Singing out of tune: sexual and developmental differences in the occurrence of nonlinear phenomena in primate songs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Multiscale Sample Entropy-Based Feature Extraction with Gaussian Mixture Model for Detection and Classification of Blue Whale Vocalization.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- BASSA: New software tool reveals hidden details in visualisation of low-frequency animal sounds.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- An innovative way for whales to sing.Nature · 2024Article
- Singing more, singing harsher: occurrence of nonlinear phenomena in a primate' song.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- All units are equal in humpback whale songs, but some are more equal than others.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Female large odorous frogs (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Harsh is large: nonlinear vocal phenomena lower voice pitch and exaggerate body size.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Multiple pygmy blue whale acoustic populations in the Indian Ocean: whale song identifies a possible new population.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Bidirectional Interactions With Humpback Whale Singer Using Concrete Sound Elements.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although mammalian vocalizations are predominantly harmonically structured, they can exhibit an acoustic complexity with nonlinear vocal sounds, including deterministic chaos and frequency jumps. Such sounds are normative events in mammalian vocalizations, and can be directly traceable to the nonlinear nature of vocal-fold dynamics underlying typical mammalian sound production. In this study, we give qualitative descriptions and quantitative analyses of nonlinearities in the song repertoire of humpback whales from the Ste Marie channel (Madagascar) to provide more insight into the potential communication functions and underlying production mechanisms of these features. A low-dimensional biomechanical modeling of the whale's U-fold (vocal folds homolog) is used to relate specific vocal mechanisms to nonlinear vocal features. Recordings of living humpback whales were searched for occurrences of vocal nonlinearities (instabilities). Temporal distributions of nonlinearities were assessed within sound units, and between different songs. The anatomical production sources of vocal nonlinearities and the communication context of their occurrences in recordings are discussed. Our results show that vocal nonlinearities may be a communication strategy that conveys information about the whale's body size and physical fitness, and thus may be an important component of humpback whale songs.
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