Acoustic sequences in non-human animals: a tutorial review and prospectus.

Animal acoustic communication often takes the form of complex sequences, made up of multiple distinct acoustic units. Apart from the well-known example of birdsong, other animals such as insects, amphibians, and mammals (including bats, rodents, primates, and cetaceans) also generate complex acoustic sequences. Occasionally, such as with birdsong, the adaptive role of these sequences seems clear (e.g. mate attraction and territorial defence). More often however, researchers have only begun to characterise - let alone understand - the significance and meaning of acoustic sequences. Hypotheses abound, but there is little agreement as to how sequences should be defined and analysed. Our review aims to outline suitable methods for testing these hypotheses, and to describe the major limitations to our current and near-future knowledge on questions of acoustic sequences. This review and prospectus is the result of a collaborative effort between 43 scientists from the fields of animal behaviour, ecology and evolution, signal processing, machine learning, quantitative linguistics, and information theory, who gathered for a 2013 workshop entitled, 'Analysing vocal sequences in animals'. Our goal is to present not just a review of the state of the art, but to propose a methodological framework that summarises what we suggest are the best practices for research in this field, across taxa and across disciplines. We also provide a tutorial-style introduction to some of the most promising algorithmic approaches for analysing sequences. We divide our review into three sections: identifying the distinct units of an acoustic sequence, describing the different ways that information can be contained within a sequence, and analysing the structure of that sequence. Each of these sections is further subdivided to address the key questions and approaches in that area. We propose a uniform, systematic, and comprehensive approach to studying sequences, with the goal of clarifying research terms used in different fields, and facilitating collaboration and comparative studies. Allowing greater interdisciplinary collaboration will facilitate the investigation of many important questions in the evolution of communication and sociality.

This review was developed at an investigative workshop, “Analyzing Animal Vocal Communication Sequences” that took place on October 21–23 2013 in Knoxville, Tennessee, sponsored by the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS). NIMBioS is an Institute sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture through NSF Awards #EF-0832858 and #DBI-1300426, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In addition to the authors, Vincent Janik participated in the workshop. D.T.B.’s research is currently supported by NSF DEB-1119660. M.A.B.’s research is currently supported by NSF IOS-0842759 and NIH R01DC009582. M.A.R.’s research is supported by ONR N0001411IP20086 and NOPP (ONR/BOEM) N00014-11-1-0697. S.L.DeR.’s research is supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. R.F.-i-C.’s research was supported by the grant BASMATI (TIN2011-27479-C04-03) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. E.C.G.’s research is currently supported by a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship. E.E.V.’s research is supported by CONACYT, Mexico, award number I010/214/2012.

This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/brv.12160