general

Successful sound communication between animals located in vegetation requires that the sound signals penetrating the vegetation retain sufficient amplitude and structure to allow the receiving animals to extract the message. In many cases, the sounds should also provide information about the sender's position in space. One often finds that the messages have survived the sound degradation in the vegetation, whereas the information about position has been lost. However, the ability of animals to obtain directional information by listening to degraded sounds depends on the properties of their hearing systems. In many animals, the directional hearing is based only on differences of sound amplitude at the ears. Other animals also exploit differences in time-of-arrival (phase), and their directional hearing appears to be more immune to sound degradation. Different phase mechanisms (neural and acoustical) and strategies for sound communication will be discussed.

Sounds produced by animals are often very apparent to humans, indeed in some instances these sounds are the only indication of the presence of the animal. Sound is also a key channel of communication between animals and can play a role in orientation, navigation and prey capture. These factors mean that bioacoustics can be a useful tool in several contexts from census and monitoring roles in conservation, through indications of welfare status to the impacts of anthropogenic noise. The same factors mean that an understanding of aspects of bioacoustics is important in pure research, i.e. research addressing fundamental questions. Despite this obvious commonality there is relatively little interaction between pure and applied aspects of bioacoustics. This talk will seek to redress the balance using examples drawn from acoustic communication, conservation and anthropogenic noise.

New technologies in the distribution of information are changing the world as we know it. lnternet, the worldwide computer network on which the World Wide Web runs, offers new opportunities to distribute and share information on all interesting subjects (and even on non-interesting ones!) at a very low cost, via easy hypertextual browsing interfaces. "lnteresting'' and Non-interesting'' will then show their relativeness, as this media is going to give almost everybody the chance to have access to an enormous group of listeners. They can listen if they wish to, just as they can decide to visit a book-store or a news-stand. This is not our discovery, as all these tools have been developed by others. What we are doing is making a proposal about applying these tools to our research interests. Publishing documents on a World Wide Web site is a good opportunity to present the activities being carried out, both from a general point of view and from a highly specialized one at the same time. Documents can be nested starting from general explanation pages continuing even into reference schemes and tables, linking sounds, images, short movies or whatever can now be contained in a computer. The effort required to do so is not difficult, if you consider that almost every page written nowadays is typed on a computer, and so already available in electronic format. From a democratic point of view, as universities and research centers are often supported out of public funding (i.e. money coming from taxes), this is an opportunity to let people know how their money is spent. The researcher must not underestimate this opportunity, but use it to share ideas, to discuss techniques, projects and solutions and to write about goals. For our part we have prepared a series of pages intended to introduce bioacoustics for educational purposes to the general public and to describe both our research and the instruments we have developed. We would like our documents to be considered as a reference for those starting to get involved with bioacoustics, and as a stimulus for the experienced to explain to the others what they are working on. The pages we have mentioned are available on the lnternet, using a WWW-browser, at HTTP://WWW.UNIPV.IT/~WEBCIB. Our e-mail is: WEBCIB@IPV512.UNIPV.IT

The evaluation of a subject very much depends on a correct use of terminology. Bioacoustics is an interdisciplinary subject. Consequently its terminology comes from both biology and acoustics. The scientists involved in bioacoustics are well acquainted with biology and I will disregard the biological terminology at this opportunity, although there are confusions regarding the meaning of commonly used terms like "strophe'', "phrase'' "melody" etc. These terms require their special definitions and standardizations. I will confine my paper to some fundamental acoustical terms used within bioacoustics. Bioacoustics also involves the use of electroacoustical instrumentation. It is necessary to know the limitation of these instruments and therefore also to know the properties of them. This also includes some electroacoustical terms which will be covered. Système International d'Unitéts, SI, was internationally accepted in 1960 and covers all fields of science and technology. It means that texts and figures in scientific papers should conform to the quantities and units given in these standards. In my paper I describe some figures and diagrams and list the fundamentals of SI related to acoustics. They concern mainly frequencies and levels in the sound system from source and field to the receiver.

The organisation of scientific knowledge and the tools of information retrieval have traditionally been discipline-based, an approach which is effective for a homogenous user-base. However, profound changes in the presentation of scientific thought, notably an increase in collaboration and a blurring of the literary boundaries between disciplines, call for corresponding changes in the electronic information retrieval systems designed to serve the complex information needs of interdisciplinary scientists. This paper describes a project to address this challenge, by studying the information-seeking behaviour of the members of a representative interdisciplinary science organisation, the International Bioacoustics Council (IBAC), and identifying the problems they encounter in using discipline-based information systems. The presentation will include a summary of findings from the survey and demonstration of a prototype system design to facilitate interdisciplinary information seeking (supported by Institute of Museum and Library Service-LL90187 National Organization for Hearing Research and NIMH-58198).