Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 27, 2026

Eliciting and Analyzing Male Mouse Ultrasonic Vocalization (USV) Songs
Published on: May 9, 2017
Syllable acoustics, temporal patterns, and call composition vary with behavioral context in Mexican free-tailed bats
Kirsten M Bohn1, Barbara Schmidt-French, Sean T Ma
1Section of Neurobiology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. kbohn@mail.utexas.edu
None:
Recent research has shown that some bat species have rich vocal repertoires with diverse syllable acoustics. Few studies, however, have compared vocalizations across different behavioral contexts or examined the temporal emission patterns of vocalizations. In this paper, a comprehensive examination of the vocal repertoire of Mexican free-tailed bats, T. brasiliensis, is presented. Syllable acoustics and temporal emission patterns for 16 types of vocalizations including courtship song revealed three main findings. First, although in some cases syllables are unique to specific calls, other syllables are shared among different calls. Second, entire calls associated with one behavior can be embedded into more complex vocalizations used in entirely different behavioral contexts. Third, when different calls are composed of similar syllables, distinctive temporal emission patterns may facilitate call recognition. These results indicate that syllable acoustics alone do not likely provide enough information for call recognition; rather, the acoustic context and temporal emission patterns of vocalizations may affect meaning.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Echo
Imagine the sound is reflected back to the ears. Assuming that the source is very close to the human, the difference between hearing the two sounds—the emitted sound and the reflected sound—may be more than the minimum time for perceiving distinct sounds. If this is the case, then the...
The Cochlea
Migration
Convergent Evolution
Hearing
Perceiving Loudness, Pitch, and Location
Place theory, or place coding, suggests that different pitches are heard because various sound waves activate specific locations along the cochlea's basilar membrane. The brain determines the pitch of a sound by identifying...

