GELIFES Seminars - Coen Elemans

Coen Elemans (University of Southern Denmark)

All singing, all-dancing

The embodied motor control of the animal voice

Communication by sound, or vocal communication, is the fastest, most accurate, and information-rich modality and essential to vertebrate survival and speciation. My central aim is to understand how the developing body and brain interact over developmental timescales to produce such complex signals. As an essential first step, my lab has over the last 10 years shown that a universal biophysical mechanism underlies sound generation in all vertebrates including birds, frogs, rodents, primates, bats, and most recently also toothed and baleen whales. This was the crucial groundwork for the next program: defining and quantifying the parameters that modulate vocal signals. We will use an inseparable experimental / computational / biorobotics approach to causally link motor control to sound in major animal model systems. This will elucidate the fundamental motor control and learning strategies of voice production in vertebrates, including humans, from neuromuscular to evolutionary timescales.

Biosketch
Coen Elemans’s research group strives to build a causal model of voice motor control for all vocal vertebrates. He is pioneering an integrative, high-tech experimental approach combining comparative laboratory and computational model studies. He developed several experimental setups and sensor technologies that lead to unprecedented observations and quantification in studying voice and muscle physiology - from isolated cells and organs to freely behaving animals, and publications in the highest-ranking interdisciplinarity journals (e.g. Nature, Science, PNAS). Coen has received several international awards, e.g. the Bolk award, MBL Grass Fellow and BioMed Central Research Award. He is director of the international PhD summer school in Bioacoustics and head of the Sound, Communication and Behavior Group at SDU.

Link to seminar