I sound consonant, therefore I am. A comparative approach to the study of acoustic consonance in animacy perception

To make sense of the outside world, and thus enhance the chances of survival, a great variety of animal species make use of acoustic communication. This is particularly true in those taxa that live in groups, where this type of communicative medium proved to be integral in managing social interactions. Despite the great interest and recent development in the emerging field of bioacoustics, few studies have considered the acoustic mechanisms at the basis of agents’ recognition, i.e., the acoustic signatures of animacy; therefore, this project aims at broadening our knowledge concerning the biological roots of the capacity to identify biological agents in the environment through sound. In particular, a perceptual feature that seems to be exploited as a means to spot an organism is consonance. Consequently, we have adopted a comparative approach, taking into account different types of vocal emissions belonging to various avian and mammalian species, with the aim of analysing the statistical composition of these natural sounds.