IMPROVED MULTIPLE BIRDSONG TRACKING WITH DISTRIBUTION DERIVATIVE METHOD AND MARKOV RENEWAL PROCESS CLUSTERING

DS & MP are supported by an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship EP/G007144/1

Segregating Event Streams and Noise with a Markov Renewal Process Model

DS and MP are supported by EPSRC Leadership Fellowship EP/G007144/1

Hidden Markov Models

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), although known for decades, have made a big career nowadays and are still in state of development. This book presents theoretical issues and a variety of HMMs applications in speech recognition and synthesis, medicine, neurosciences, computational biology, bioinformatics, seismology, environment protection and engineering. I hope that the reader will find this book useful and helpful for their own research

The avian dawn chorus across Great Britain: using new technology to study breeding bird song

The avian dawn chorus is a period of high song output performed daily around sunrise during the breeding season. Singing at dawn is of such significance to birds that they remain motivated to do so amid the noise of numerous others. Yet, we still do not fully understand why the dawn chorus exists. Technological advances in recording equipment, data storage and sound analysis tools now enable collection and scrutiny of large acoustic datasets, encouraging research on sound-producing organisms and promoting ‘the soundscape’ as an indicator of ecosystem health. Using an unrivalled dataset of dawn chorus recordings collected during this thesis, I explore the chorus throughout Great Britain with the prospect of furthering our understanding and appreciation of this daily event. I first evaluate the performance of four automated signal recognition tools (‘recognisers’) when identifying the singing events of target species during the dawn chorus, and devise a new ensemble approach that improves detection of singing events significantly over each of the recognisers in isolation. I then examine daily variation in the timing and peak of the chorus across the country in response to minimum overnight temperature. I conclude that cooler temperatures result in later chorus onset and peak the following dawn, but that the magnitude of this effect is greater at higher latitude sites with cooler and less variable overnight temperature regimes. Next, I present evidence of competition for acoustic space during the dawn chorus between migratory and resident species possessing similar song traits, and infer that this may lead either to fine-scale temporal partitioning of song, such that each competitor maintains optimal output, or to one competitor yielding. Finally, I investigate day-to-day attenuation of song during the leaf-out period from budburst through to full-leaf in woodland trees, and establish the potential for climate-driven advances in leaf-out phenology to attenuate song if seasonal singing activity in birds has not advanced to the same degree. I find that gradual attenuation of sound through the leaf-out process is dependent on the height of the receiver, and surmise that current advances in leaf-out phenology are unlikely to have undue effect on song propagation. This project illustrates the advantage of applying new technology to ecological studies of complex acoustic environments, and highlights areas in need of improvement, which is essential if we are to comprehend and preserve our natural soundscapes

Reinforcement Learning

Brains rule the world, and brain-like computation is increasingly used in computers and electronic devices. Brain-like computation is about processing and interpreting data or directly putting forward and performing actions. Learning is a very important aspect. This book is on reinforcement learning which involves performing actions to achieve a goal. The first 11 chapters of this book describe and extend the scope of reinforcement learning. The remaining 11 chapters show that there is already wide usage in numerous fields. Reinforcement learning can tackle control tasks that are too complex for traditional, hand-designed, non-learning controllers. As learning computers can deal with technical complexities, the tasks of human operators remain to specify goals on increasingly higher levels. This book shows that reinforcement learning is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and applications and it shall stimulate and encourage new research in this field

Improved multiple birdsong tracking with distribution derivative method and Markov renewal process clustering

Segregating an audio mixture containing multiple simultaneous bird sounds is a challenging task. However, birdsong often contains rapid pitch modulations, and these modulations carry information which may be of use in automatic recognition. In this paper we demonstrate that an improved spectrogram representation, based on the distribution derivative method, leads to improved performance of a segregation algorithm which uses a Markov renewal process model to track vocalisation patterns consisting of singing and silences.DS & MP are supported by an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship EP/G007144/1

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music by Steven Jan is a comprehensive account of the relationships between evolutionary theory and music. Examining the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ that drives biological and musical-cultural evolution, the book provides a distinctive commentary on how musicality and music can shed light on our understanding of Darwin’s famous theory, and vice-versa. Comprised of seven chapters, with several musical examples, figures and definitions of terms, this original and accessible book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the relationships between music and evolutionary thought. Jan guides the reader through key evolutionary ideas and the development of human musicality, before exploring cultural evolution, evolutionary ideas in musical scholarship, animal vocalisations, music generated through technology, and the nature of consciousness as an evolutionary phenomenon. A unique examination of how evolutionary thought intersects with music, Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music is essential to our understanding of how and why music arose in our species and why it is such a significant presence in our lives