Physical models for the analysis of acoustical systems in biology

Abstract

One of the important problems of biophysics is to understand in detail the mechanisms by which animals produce acoustic signals, and the ways in which other animals, of the same or different species, detect and process these signals, through the masking effects of ambient noise, to extract their information content. At a primitive level this information relates simply to the presence of the other animal and perhaps to its proximity and direction. At the next level we find some sort of coding in the acoustic signal which identifies the species and perhaps the sex, and finally there is the whole range of information content and emotional overtone contained in a complex sound like human speech or music.