Bark beetles and pinhole borers (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae and Platypodinae), also known as bark and ambrosia beetles, are two subfamilies of weevils that have evolved acoustic communication within plant tissue. These insects are able to transmit and detect sound in a medium that is neither air nor water, and are among the smallest animals with sound producing organs. Despite these characteristics, sound production in these taxa is sorely understudied, mostly due to the difficulties associated with acoustically monitoring individuals inside plants. I analysed the stridulatory sounds from males and females of 55 bark and ambrosia beetle species, making this the largest acoustic dataset of these beetles to date, and provide a general description and comparison of the collected sounds. Depending on the species, either both sexes stridulated or only one. Some species had calls with different acoustic morphotypes (one, two, or three notes), and when both sexes stridulated, sounds generally differed. I also performed a literature review and combined both acoustic and metadata to investigate the effects of the type of mating system ‒ and its interactions with body size and phylogeny ‒ on the use of acoustic communication. I found that the interaction between size and mating system plays an elemental role in determining the presence and sex-dependence of acoustic communication in a species. Aside from this, I used a bark beetle species (Hylurgus ligniperda) as a model organism to study individual sound production and dyadic interactions among males and females. In this experiment, five spectro-temporal parameters were used as descriptors to quantify call variations depending on behavioural context. I also proposed a method for automatically extracting and analysing stridulatory sounds, which allows acoustically discriminating amongst individuals, and propose a new set of definitions for the descriptions of bark and ambrosia beetle stridulations. In a related experiment, I report, for the first time, light-induced sound- production in weevils. I found that light-based stimuli reliably elicits instantaneous acoustic responses in male Hylesinus aculeatus. Light-elicited acoustic communication has potential applications in the development of electronic traps, real-time acoustic detection and identification of beetles, and noise-reduction in acoustic data collection.