Use of recurrence plots for identification and extraction of patterns in humpback whale song recordings

Franck Malige (1, 2, 3) , Divna Djokic (4, 5) , Julie Patris (1, 6, 3) , Renata Sousa-Lima (4, 5) , Hervé Glotin (1, 2, 3)

1 LIS - Laboratoire d'Informatique et des Systèmes (LIS) (Marseille, Toulon)
2 UTLN - Université de Toulon
3 DYNI - DYNamiques de l’Information
4 laboratory of bioacoustics
5 Graduate Program of Psychobiology, UFRN
6 AMU - Aix Marseille Université

Humpback whale song is comprised of well-structured distinct levels of organisation: combinations of sounds, repetition of combinations, and a sequence of repetitions, which have no clear silent intervals. This continuous sound output can be hard to delimit, rather, it could be interpreted as a long series of states of a system. Recurrence plots are graphical represen­tations of such series of states and have been used to describe animal behaviour previously. Here, we aim to apply this tool to visualise and recognise structures traditionally used in infer­ences about behaviour (songs and themes) in the series of units manually extracted from recordings of humpback whales. Data from the Abrolhos bank, Brazil were subjected to these analyses. Our analytical tool has proven efficient in identifying themes and songs from continuous recordings avoiding some of the human perception bias and caveats. Furthermore, our song extraction is robust to errors coming from both manual and automated transcriptions, constructing a level of descrip­tion largely independent of the first stage of analysis.

Mots clés: sound sequences; soundtranscription; Humpback whale; song; recurrence plot; song structure; sound visualization

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Franck Malige, Divna Djokic, Julie Patris, Renata Sousa-Lima, Hervé Glotin. Use of recurrence plots for identification and extraction of patterns in humpback whale song recordings. Bioacoustics, 2020, pp.1 - 16. ⟨10.1080/09524622.2020.1845240⟩. ⟨hal-03008908⟩