Just how does the male fruit fly woo the female into mating? The Murthy lab has pioneered studies of the acoustic communication system of Drosophila to address fundamental questions related to the neural mechanisms underlying sensory perception and subsequent downstream behaviors. Flies produce and process patterned sounds during their mating ritual. Using a combination of novel behavioral assays, neural circuit perturbations, neural recordings, and computational modeling, Murthy’s lab discovered that male song structure and intensity are continually sculpted by interactions with the female, over timescales ranging from tens of milliseconds to minutes. Using a similar set of tools, the female side of acoustic communication has also been studied. The research of the lab will look at the fundamental principles of how brains mediate perceptions, thoughts, actions, and ultimately communicate with other individuals.