Tohoku University launches crowdfunding project with the goal of understanding the language of little birds

With the desire to understand the language of a little bird that communicates with different voices. The Laboratory of Brain Development, Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University, initiated solicitation of donation for a crowdfunding project, 'support for the purchase of experimental equipment to analyze bird languages for communicating with birds in the future.' The target amount is 2 million yen.

Some birds use a variety of voices to communicate with other individuals. These sounds are emitted with a purpose; however, it is necessary to study their communication in the field in detail, to know the situation in which birds use these sounds. However, there are many difficulties, and it has been reported that observation of this communication is difficult. This is because it is difficult to observe communication without the subject being aware of the presence of the observer, and it is difficult to obtain highly accurate voice data from outdoor recordings.

Therefore, the research group established an experimental system that presents a pseudo-social situation as a virtual reality (VR) stimulus in the laboratory environment, which ensures collection of social action data such as vocalization. The tweets emitted by the little bird was converted to text information by a computer program, making it possible to convert the phonemes in the song into characters without delay within 24 hours. Furthermore, in contrast, the research group established a technology to produce a song with the sound of a small bird from a text character string, and it is also possible to artificially create and present an artificial song consisting of an arbitrary sequence of sounds.

Currently, using this technology, the research group presents artificial social situations and artificial synthetic voices to small birds as VR information, record the response of the voices according to the simulation, and analyze it at any given time. However, to understand the contents of the communication of birds, it is necessary to acquire voice data on a large scale using many individuals at the same time. The research group will use these funds to enhance the experimental setup (bird isolation breeding environment, data acquisition and analysis computer, VR information presentation monitor, and voice recording microphone and interface) as much as possible.