Model-based prosthetic songbird's vocal organ

EZEQUIEL M. ARNEODO; YONATAN SANZ PERL; FRANZ GOLLER; GABRIEL B. MINDLIN

Santiago

Conferencia; XVII Conference on Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics and Nonlinear Physics (MEDYFINOL); 2012

Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs) decode motor instructions from neuro-physiological recordings and feed them to bio-mimetic effectors.Many applications achieve high accuracy on a limited number of tasks by applying statistical methodsto these data to extract features corresponding to certain motor instructions.%We built a bio-prosthetic avian vocal organ, based on a low-dimensional mathematical model that accounts for the dynamics of a songbird´s vocal organ. As the rich and diverse vocalizations of oscine birds emerge as a result of the interaction between a pattern generator in the brain and a nonlinear peripheral biomechanical effector,smooth paths in a physiologically meaningful parameter space relate to complex sequences of vocalizations.%The two physiological motor gestures (sub-syringeal pressure and ventral syringeal muscular activity),can be reconstructed form the bird´s song. The reduction of the model to its normal form allows for its implementation on a portable Digital Signal Processorto produce synthetic birdsong when driven by a freely behaving bird via its sub-syringeal pressure gesture.