Wageningen, 14 December 1998 - Noldus Information Technology is pleased to announce the release of UltraVox for Windows, a professional system for automatic monitoring and analysis ultrasonic vocalizations. Within the field of neuroscience, ultrasonic utterances are seen as a valuable measure for anxiety, motivational state, drug withdrawal, etc. By providing flexible acquisition settings, real-time visualization of the filtering process, descriptive statistics and easy export and integration, the new UltraVox for Windows allows every neurobiologist, behavioral pharmacologist and neurotoxicologist to detect and analyze ultrasound the way he or she wants to. 

UltraVox serves a smart acoustic event recorder, combining an ultrasound detector, an audio filter and the UltraVox software. The ultrasound detector shifts the ultrasound to the audible frequency range. Next, the audio filter, which receives the direct output of the ultrasound detector, sends a signal to the computer for as long as the sound exceeds a user-defined amplitude threshold. The UltraVox software then converts this signal to onset and offset times of the vocalizations. 

Advanced filter settings - To detect only the vocalizations of interest and to get rid of noise and other irrelevant sounds, UltraVox allows the user to specify a minimum duration for both vocalizations and the interval between vocalizations. Using these two filter parameters and an accuracy of 1 millisecond, UltraVox can monitor vocalizations with virtually any type of temporal structure.

Real-time display and analysis - To allow instantaneous assessment of the effectiveness of the applied filter settings, UltraVox displays a real-time graphical representation of the filter process. By comparing time-event plots for the unfiltered and filtered signal, it is directly evident which sounds are filtered out of the signal and which sounds are detected by UltraVox. In addition to this, continuous real-time updates of the number of vocalizations, total duration, mean duration and other descriptive statistics offer immediate insight into the structure of the detected vocalizations.

Easy export and analysis - After the experiment is finished, one can export multiple data files at once for higher statistical analysis. The descriptive statistics of multiple trials can be exported in a single output file, allowing direct comparison of results between treatments.

Suitable for high-throughput screening - Testing large numbers of animals is no longer a problem and is achieved with minimal effort on the user’s side. The acquisition settings only have to be defined once, and UltraVox will automatically start series of trials and create data file names as they are generated. This saves large amounts of time and prevents errors in file names and other manually entered settings and variables.

For more information, please contact the product manager of UltraVox.