Send email to hulse@jhu.edu or call me at (410) 516-7081. I am located in 136 Ames Hall.
I study problems in acoustic perception and communication, primarily in songbirds and also have interests in animal cognition, learning, and memory.
An important evolutionary question is how human and nonhuman animals abstract important auditory information from the world around them. Songbirds have evolved to send and receive information about sexual readiness and territorial defense, and humans have developed language and music. Sometimes important sounds must be singled out and identified in a noisy acoustic background, such as a familiar human voice in a crowded room, an oboe in a symphony orchestra, or the bird song of a potential mate buried in the noise of the forest at dawn. My research is an analysis of how animals share solutions to these important perceptual and cognitive problems.
In one research program, for example, songbirds learn to discriminate between synthesized sound patterns which contain features that might be important for natural communication. Responses to the patterns are analyzed to discover acoustic features that are critical for the discrimination. This information is then used in experiments involving natural bird song to understand the birds' natural means of communication.
Other work examines how song birds learn to pay attention to target sounds that are mixed concurrently with other important signals or with noise. The question is how animals parse this auditory scene into its many functional acoustic "objects." For example, it is adaptively useful for an animal in the forest to distinguish the footsteps of a predator from other forest sounds. The ability to focus attention selectively on auditory objects is being studied in song birds as a function of changes in the cues that facilitate scene analysis.
My lab has also has done comparative studies of music perception. This work is sometimes done in conjunction with the Computer Music Studio at the Peabody Institute and Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University. Using human music perception as a metaphor, research examines how humans and animals process pitch, rhythm and timbre in auditory perception.
Braaten, R. F., & Hulse, S. H. (1993). Perceptual organization of auditory temporal patterns in European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). Perception and Psychophysics, 54, 567-578.
MacDougall-Shackleton, S., & Hulse, S. H. (1996). Concurrent absolute and relative pitch processing by European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 110, 139-146.
Hulse, S. H., MacDougall-Shackleton, S. A., & Wisniewski, A. B. (1997). Auditory scene analysis by song birds: Stream segregation of bird song by European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 111, 3-13.
Chaiken, M., Gentner, T. Q., & Hulse, S. H. (1997). Effects of social interaction on the development of starling song and the perception of these effects by conspecifics. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 111, 379-392.
Wisniewski, A. B., & Hulse, S. H. (1997). Auditory scene analysis in European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris): Discrimination of starling song segments, their segregation from conspecific song, and evidence for conspecific song categorization. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 111, 337-350
Ball, G. F., & Hulse, S. H. (1998). Bird Song. American Psychologist, 53, 37-58.
MacDougall-Shackleton, S. A., Hulse, S. H., Gentner, T. Q., & White, W. (1998). Auditory scene analysis by song birds: Evidence for stream segregation of tone sequences distinguished by pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 103, 3581-3587.
Gentner, T. Q., & Hulse, S. H. (1998). Perceptual mechanisms for individual vocal recognition in European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). Animal Behavior, 56, 579-594.
Last revised 6/7/2000