MAT 317: Mathematical Models of Singing Whales
12 — 16 September 2005
- Dr. Mercado's Public Lecture (MS PowerPoint, 3.3 Mb)
| Instructor: | Eduardo Mercado III Department of Psychology State University at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260 Email: emiii@buffalo.edu |
Course Outline: The humpback whale auditory system may be the most dynamic acoustic processing system on the planet, and yet little is known about its basic capabilities and even less is known about how it functions. Humpback whales are best known for their singing behavior, which is believed by most scientists to be a sexual advertisement display. The sounds that humpback whales produce can provide important clues about humpbacks’ auditory capabilities. Biomimetic models of sound production and reception can be derived from the acoustic features of humpback whale sounds. These models can be used in combination with simulations of sound propagation in the ocean environments frequented by humpback whales, to determine what types of bioacoustic information are available for humpback whales to process. By understanding how biology and environmental conditions constrain how humpback whales perceive sounds, one can gain new insights into how they might use those sounds. For example, simulations of humpback whale song transmission and reception suggest that humpbacks can potentially use sounds within their songs as low-frequency echolocation signals to detect and localize other whales at ranges exceeding two kilometers. These simulations also indicate that song sounds contain spectral information that could allow listening whales to determine how far the sounds have traveled.
Time permitting, this course may also include a discussion of geometric models of sound propagation, Fourier analysis, wave-equation based models of sound propagation, signal processing techniques for analyzing sound, connectionist techniques of adaptive classification, and sonar theory.
Biographical Information: Dr Eduardo Mercado has an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Hawaii (1998). Mercado recently joined the Department of Psychology at SUNY Buffalo (2002) after having completed the following postdoctoral fellowships: (1) Society for Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellowship (2001), (2) SACNAS Neuroscience Scholars Fellowship (2000–2001), and (3) Society for Neuroscience Conference Fellowship (2000–2001).
Dr Mercado’s research interests include the neurobiology of learning and memory; cortical plasticity and representation of events; sound perception and production; and connectionist models and computational neuroscience. Mercado’s postdoctoral studies were on Integrative Neuroscience at Rutgers University, and Auditory Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. Mercado is the principal investigator on a Learning and Representation in Auditory Perception grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.