Humans
Humans express their emotions in various ways. For example, fear can be expressed as a loud scream and sadness by crying. However, emotions also play an important role in our music and in the sound of our voice. This way the sound of a song or the voice of a narrator can lead us to feel a certain emotion. For this reason, it has been hypothesized that the expression of emotion might have played a crucial role in the evolution of language and music.
Listen to how different human emotions can sound! What could the person feel and which emotions do you feel when hearing these recordings?
Animals
Animals produce a multitude of different signals, which are strongly influenced by their emotional states. In our research, we investigate how emotions impact the communication systems of meerkats. Depending on the predator and urgency, meerkats use different alarm calls. However, a meerkat does not even have to see the predator – hearing an alarm call is sufficient to cause a respective reaction.
In this situation, a meerkat has spotted a predator on land. However, the predator is still far away.
Listen to how the call changes as the predator gets closer and the animal becomes more agitated:
Machines
Nowadays, computers can imitate human emotions increasingly well. Therefore, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between sound generated from artificial intelligence and human music and poetry. This has become possible thanks to machine learning, which generates artificial knowledge based on previous experiences, similar to how humans acquire knowledge.
The following audio files were generated exclusively by artificial intelligence.
Quiz
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