BACKGROUND Models of honest advertisement predict that sexually selected calls should signal male quality. In most vertebrates, high quality males have larger body sizes that determine higher social status and in turn higher reproductive success. Previous research has emphasised the importance of vocal tract resonances or formant frequencies of calls as cues to body size in mammals. However, th...

In this chapter psycho-physical methods which are useful for both psycho-acoustics and sound-quality engineering will be discussed, namely, the methods of random access, the semantic differential, category scaling and magnitude estimation. Models of basic psycho-acoustic quantities like loudness, sharpness and roughness as well as composite metrics like psycho-acoustic annoyance will be introdu...

Acoustic methods have progressed to the point that an acoustic typology of the motor speech disorders can be constructed from a parameteric assessment of the speech subsystems (e.g., phonation, nasal resonance, vowel articulation, consonant articulation, intonation, and rhythm). The results of this analysis can be interpreted in respect to global functions in speech (e.g., voice quality, intell...

One of the long-term goals of this project is to analyze and propose energy-efficient communication techniques for underwater acoustic sensor networks. These techniques aim at consuming as less energy as possible as well as guaranteeing a minimum quality of service. In order to do so, we assume and validate some statistics of the underwater acoustic channels and derive stochastic optimal transm...