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Piep Piep Piep – Ich Hab’ Dich Lieb: Rhythm as an Indicator of Mate Quality

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Advances in Artificial Life (ECAL 2003)

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Abstract

Rhythm is common in courtship signals of many species. Here we explore whether regularly repeating rhythmic patterns can serve as indicators of underlying mate quality. We find through simulation that rhythmic signals allow the greatest discrimination between high- and low-quality males when low quality is associated with timing errors in artificial songs. However, rhythmic signals are difficult to evolve in our framework, leading to the conclusion that other pressures may have been involved in their appearance.

“Peep peep peep, I love you”, from the song “Guildo hat euch lieb”, by Guildo Horn And The Orthopaedic Stockings, Germany’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 1998: http://willow.dyndns.org/rachel/doh/jukebox/guildo.htm

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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van den Broek, E., Todd, P.M. (2003). Piep Piep Piep – Ich Hab’ Dich Lieb: Rhythm as an Indicator of Mate Quality. In: Banzhaf, W., Ziegler, J., Christaller, T., Dittrich, P., Kim, J.T. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2801. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39432-7_45

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39432-7_45

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20057-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39432-7

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