Adaptation is an important capability in a fast-changing world. What factors allow an animal population to adapt to external changes in their environments? What effects do those changes have on the animal populations that do adapt? This paper explores these questions in the context of intraspecies communication in a noisy soundscape. Using a simulated soundscape and populations generated using Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), the same scenario is played through many times to understand the range of possible outcomes given an initial population and a set of noise conditions. While noise is found to have minimal effect on the best possible scenario, it affects how often that scenario is reached. The onset of noise is also found to impact the complexity of the evolved neural networks.

Artificial life simulations are an important tool in the study of ecological phenomena that can be difficult to examine directly in natural environments. Recent work has established the soundscape as an ecologically important resource and it has been proposed that the differentiation of animal vocalizations within a soundscape is driven by the imperative of intraspecies communication. The experiments in this paper test that hypothesis in a simulated soundscape in order to verify the feasibility of intraspecies communication as a driver of acoustic niche differentiation. The impact of intraspecies communication is found to be a significant factor in the division of a soundscape’s frequency spectrum when compared to simulations where the need to identify signals from conspecifics does not drive the evolution of signalling. The method of simulating the effects of interspecies interactions on the soundscape is positioned as a tool for developing artificial life agents that can inhabit and interact with physical ecosystems and soundscapes.