Redefining Acoustic Units Found Within the Vocal Repertoire of White-handed Gibbons (Hylobates lar) — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

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Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

Redefining Acoustic Units Found Within the Vocal Repertoire of White-handed Gibbons (Hylobates lar)

Name: Caitlin McCombe
Major: Biology
Hometown: Cedarburg, WI
Faculty Sponsor: Angela Dassow
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Independent research

Abstract

Vocalizations between between female and male gibbons are essential to maintaining communication in their dense, forested habitats. The vocal repertoire of the white-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) consists of twenty-eight acoustic units, including the /s/, /t/, and /u/ units. These units occur as /s/, /s-t/ bigram, or /s-t-u/ trigram within the vocal repertoire. Reanalysis of the data suggests that the /s/ acoustic units should be divided into additional subcategories. Adobe Audition CC 2017.0.2 was used to measure the start, stop, fundamental, maximum, minimum, and dominant frequencies for each acoustic unit type, as well as the bandwidth and duration of the calls. These classification features were used to subdivide the /s/ unit using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA); however further subdivisions of the /t/, and /u/ units were not supported. If new categorizations of the acoustic units are found to be perceptually recognized by gibbons, this could influence future studies on gibbon comprehension and vocalization usage.

Poster file