Tohoku University Graduate School of Life Sciences, Department of Brain Function Development, Abe Laboratory is conducting crowdfunding to promote research on deciphering the "words" of small birds.The project period is from December 2021, 12 to February 20, 2022, and the target amount is 2 million yen.
Many animals communicate with each other in a way that communicates with each other, but much remains unclear as to what messages and how they send each other.At Abe Laboratory, we are focusing on the voice communication of small birds, and are studying what kind of voice they use in what situations.In order to understand the situations and behavior patterns of birds using voice, it is necessary to study field communication in detail.However, there were problems with the observable situation and the accuracy of the data.
Therefore, Abe Laboratory has established an experimental system that presents a pseudo-social situation to a small bird using virtual reality (VR) technology in the laboratory environment and makes it take social actions such as vocalization.Furthermore, we have established a technology to convert the voice emitted by a small bird into a text character string without delay for 24 hours, and conversely, a technology to synthesize the chirping voice of a small bird from the text character string.We also succeeded in artificially creating and presenting an artificial song consisting of an arbitrary sequence of sounds.Currently, using this technology, we are presenting artificial social situations and artificial synthetic voices to small birds as VR information, recording the response of the voices according to it for 24 hours, and analyzing it at any time.
This crowdfunding will be carried out for the purpose of presenting information and adding experimental equipment necessary for recording in order to acquire voice data from more individuals on a large scale.By acquiring a large amount of data, we will analyze the "words" that many small birds will emit in the future and accelerate the realization of understanding of the "words" of small birds.