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U of M assistant professor Mark Bee and his students are hunting for frogs, and researching what their chirps and croaks imply. Specifically, they're interested in the so-called "cocktail party effect" -- the ability of many animals, including most human, beings to pick out a specific sound or voice from acoustic clutter. Being a music enthusiast himself, Bee finds a frog chorus the best resource to study this very thing. He has discovered that female frogs have an uncanny ability to identify the call and exact location of a male frog of their own species amidst mating calls that can number in the thousands. Bee and his students work on "acoustic signal recognition" during frog courtship. With their research, we hope to make the leap from frogs to humans by designing auditory aids and implant devices for humans. We're all ears.
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Bee's work on "acoustic signal recognition" during frog courtship aims to fill in details eagerly sought after by scientists working to improve human hearing aids and cochlear implant devices.
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