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Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 19: Social Systems and Group Dynamics

SOE 19.1: Talk

Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 17:00–17:15, H37

Complex Communication between Social Whales — •Sarah Hallerberg1, Heike Vester2, Kurt Hammerschmidt4, and Marc Timme1,31Network Dynamics, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen — 2Ocean Sounds, Henningsvaer, Norway — 3Faculty of Physics, University of Göttingen — 4Research Group Cognitive Ethology Lab, German Primate Center, Göttingen

Complex vocal communication simultaneously requires high cognitive abilities, a large flexibility in sound production, and advanced social interactions. Among non-humans, social whales are closest to fulfill these requirements. The fundamentals about how acoustic signals are used and how acoustic patterns are organized, however, are largely unknown. Up to date, mostly human observers classify acoustic patterns through hearing and visual comparison of spectrograms, making any such classification partly unreliable and highly subjective. Thus, objectively relating specific acoustic patterns to an observed context seems impossible so far. Here, we propose a novel perspecitve and study distributions of acoustic features (in particular, cepstrum coefficients) generated from ensembles of killer whale vocalizations conditioned on contexts. Comparing these distributions by computing Kullback-Leibler-divergences we find substantially different distributions for specific behavioural contexts, such as Salmon-feeding, Herring-feeding or non-feeding.

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