New preprint on vocal communication in zebra finches! 🐦
Earth Species Project and McGill University analyzed over 1.5 million female zebra finch calls to understand how female zebra finches modulate their vocalizations during natural exchanges.
Most of the sounds come from species with overlapping hearing range as us, but we did have to down shift the sounds from singing mice because they were a bit high for some folks. Would be interesting to try sounds like elephant rumbles or bat calls that can be totally out of our range.
check out this fun video about my recent bat project!
Fig. 1. Humans and other animals share acoustic preferences (A) Each dot depicts the mean 3 and 95% confidence interval for human responses to a pair of stimuli. Above is a phylogenetic tree, with color depicting the average agreement between humans and the species across all stimulus pairs (teal colors depict agreement, brown colors disagreement). Right are all data pooled with the horizontal bar and whiskers depicting the mean ± 95% confidence interval across all stimuli. (B) There is a significant relationship between the strength of the preference within the animal studies (x-axis) and the percent of humans that agreed with animals (y-axis). Each dot depicts a pair of stimuli, and the trendline is a simple linear correlation ± SE. (C) Reaction times were significantly faster for trials when the participant selected the stimulus that was preferred by animals (dots and error bars depict the mean ± SE across all trials). Note that, for analysis, we used z-transformed square root values, which were back transformed for visualization. (D) Intra-rater agreement is above chance both for stimulus pairs with significant inter-rater agreement (right) as well as for pairs at chance inter-rater agreement (left). Each dot depicts the mean intra-rater agreement for a stimulus pair. For all panels, colors depict the four larger phylogenetic groups (insects, birds, mammals, and frogs). * p < 0.05
Beautiful, creative work from @loganjames.bsky.social et al! doi.org/10.1101/2025...
1. Humans share sound preferences w animals (even insects!)
2. Musical experience predicts agreement w animals
"...our data indicate a more expansive shared ‘taste for the beautiful’"
#bioacoustics
#prattle 💬
Main panel of Fig 1 from paper in OP
New preprint from a bio-psych collab
many animals have preferences for sounds in their species (eg, I'm a frog, I like deeper frog croaks bc better frog mates sound deeper)
@loganjames.bsky.social tested if humans are sensitive to these prefs in 16 species
we are!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Here is a splendid study on how and when eavesdroppers may learn to discriminate #🧪
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
and it got a really lovely write-up in National Geographic! such a dream come true
my most recent paper just came out! we wrote a news story about the article here:
New from @earthspecies.bsky.social
Describes "Voxaboxen": a 1-D object detection model that improves predictions w/bidirectional output + graph matching.
Bonus: zebra finch dataset
Code: github.com/earthspecies...
#prattle 💬
#bioacoustics
cc @arikkershenbaum.bsky.social @danstowell.bsky.social
Very cool to see some of my work in collaboration with the Earth Species Project getting featured in this article!
This is the data that has the CAQ in a fit over the "decline of French" on the island of Montreal. Note this has nothing to do with the ability to speak French, or even if you work in French.
A photo of a woman speaking in front of the flags of Montreal, Quebec and Canada accompanies the following quote from Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante: “It’s a hard blow ... This measure will encourage more students to go to universities in Toronto.”
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante is concerned about the economic impact of the CAQ's out-of-province tuition plan montrealgazette.com/news/local-n...
New paper led by Lidya Yurdum (PI: @mehr.nz )—we studied people in 52 countries in an experiment translated into 31 languages, testing a core set of intuitions about music—for at least these intuitions, they were highly consistent!
t.co/vys4n7b49o
Don't worry, linguists. Biologists don't know what a species is, or what life is,
do you hear like a deer? our new gamified experiment 🧪 Calls of the Wild tests what animal you're similar to (in terms of your auditory preferences).
give it a try at themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc
(i got 'mammals')
Check out our latest web-experiment, led by @loganjames.bsky.social. It's about cross-species listening preferences themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc
