Sound Masking Strategies for Interference with Mosquito Hearing

Abstract: The use of auditory masking has long been of interest in psychoacoustics and for engineering purposes, in order to cover sounds that are disruptive to humans or to species whose habitats overlap with ours. In most cases, we seek to minimize the disturbances to the communication of wildlife. However, in the case of pathogen-carrying insects, we may want to maximize these disturbances as a way to control populations. In the current work, we explore candidate masking strategies for a generic model of active auditory systems and a model of the mosquito auditory system. For both models, we find that masks with all acoustic power focused into just one or a few frequencies perform best. We propose that masks based on rapid frequency modulation are most effective for maximal disruption of information transfer and minimizing intelligibility. We hope that these results will serve to guide the avoidance or selection of possible acoustic signals for, respectively, maximizing or minimizing communication.