animal prattle

"Evidence is provided that the acoustic adaptation hypothesis may be more associated with home range than body mass in terrestrial mammals, while predation may be an important component that facilitates this adaptation for mammals in different environments."

ICYMI 3: A remarkable finding is that optogenetic suppression of song basal ganglia affects movement parameters *if and when* they are important for learning. This figure shows that the same manipulation can increase, have no effect, or decrease frequency based on its relationship w/ learning! (1/2)

Ontogenetic evidence of socially learned call sequences in Western Australian magpies Abstract. Combinatoriality is the capacity to combine discrete vocal elements into larger structures. Previously thought unique to human language, combinat

Young magpies learn to combine calls into "sentences" much like human toddlers: through listening to family and friends!

Now available to read at @royalsocietypublishing.org
@mandyridley.bsky.social @stephanielking.bsky.social @ceb-uwa.bsky.social

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

How does vocal behavior of tropical wrens change when predators like owls Fly Into the Danger Zone around their nest?

Stop making references to that song from the Top Gun movie, and read this thread instead on a paper that answers that question

#prattle 💬
#bioacoustics

Super excited to share that the first article from my PhD has been published!

Taking 60 years of research, we looked at how long distance vocal communication in aquatic and land mammals has evolved and why.

Read here: tinyurl.com/3eydkwwc

The Conversation article: tinyurl.com/mryr7sme

Cornell Lab of Ornithology (@cornellbirds.bsky.social) The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a world leader in the study, appreciation, and conservation of birds and biodiversity. birds.cornell.edu/home/ (White-breasted Nuthatch by Hannah Criswell / Macaulay...

Data collection was delayed when the pandemic started...As I couldn't record birds on the mainland for comparison, I paused the project...

Later we realized M. candei recordings were available from the cornellbirds.bsky.social Macaulay library! Very thankful for the collection!!

Vocal and display differences in an island form of a lekking species with an acrobatic dance routine Island environments drive distinctive morphological and life history traits known as the ‘island syndrome’. Previous studies pointed to lower sexual s…

Our paper looking at vocal & display differences of Escudo manakins is online.

Vocalizations show that island manakins are derived from a hybrid population of golden- x white-collared manakins.

Interestingly, island living doesn't indicate relaxed sexual selection.

Fun project & amazing team 🏝️

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Interesting use of AI methods of self-supervised learning, to analyze canary song.

Authors demo on seasonal changes

Just published in Patterns:
doi.org/10.1016/j.pa...

Code: github.com/georgevenven...

Data: datadryad.org/dataset/doi:...

#bioacoustics
#prattle 💬

Less is more: Probabilistic reduction is best explained by small-scale predictability measures The primary research questions of this paper center on defining the amount of context that is necessary and/or appropriate when investigating the relationship between language model probabilities and ...

We wrote a thing -- showing you don't need LLMs to model language production dynamics like the tendency for speakers to reduce predictable words. All you have to do is better model how speech rate varies depending on where a word is and how long the utterance is. arxiv.org/abs/2512.23659

👍

Parrots and humans share a brain mechanism for speech Brain activity in vocalizing budgerigar parrots showed a pattern that harkened to those found in the brains of people.

When it comes to speech, parrots have the gift of gab. And the way the brains of small parrots known as budgerigars bestow this gift is remarkably similar to human speech, researchers report.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parrots-humans-brain-speech-birds

Reconstructing voice identity from noninvasive auditory cortex recordings A low-dimensional voice latent space derived from deep learning captures speaker-identity representations in the temporal voice areas and supports reconstruction of voices preserving identity information.

Thrilled: my PhD work “Reconstructing voice identity from noninvasive auditory cortex recordings” is now in @elife.bsky.social DNNs model human temporal voice areas & can reconstruct speaker identity from fMRI. Ty to supervisors, co authors, CERIMED & participants elifesciences.org/articles/98047

tired: dog whistles
wired: horse whistles

(h/t @arnavraha.bsky.social)

#prattle 💬
#bioacoustics

Apply for the Career Diversity Travel award to attend the Animal Behavior Society Conference in Cincinnati, July 14-18, 2026. Deadline: March 23, 2026. More info: https://www.animalbehaviorsociety.org/web/awards-career-diversity.php #conference

We are excited to announce that registration is open for the 2026 Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication Gordon Research Conference. The preliminary program is now live: www.grc.org/neural-mecha...

We invite everyone to apply! See you @ Sunday River, Maine, May 31-June 5, 2026.

JASA EXPRESS LETTERS

Clear speech led to shorter reaction times—but not improved intelligibility—in Mandarin fricative perception, highlighting processing speed as an important yet underrecognized dimension of clear-speech's benefit.
https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0042407

ASA PRESS

Understanding Acoustics: An Experimentalist’s View of Sound and Vibration is an open access book that provides graduate-level treatment of acoustics and vibration suitable for use in courses, for self-study, and as a reference
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-44787-8

On my way to #OSM26! ✈️🌊

Looking forward to the acoustics sessions, and to discovering other talks along the way.

You’ll find me at the Distributed Acoustic Sensing & poster session Thursday PM, sharing preliminary results from my research using DAS to monitor endangered whales 🐋. Come say hi! 👋

check out this fun video about my recent bat project!

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.

Effects of habitat structure and individual variation in a simulated acoustic communication network AnimBeh

🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

WILDLABS Awards 2026
"We are awarding $10,000 and $50,000 grants to up to 15 projects, each receiving up to one year of funding to advance their #conservation #technology work."

https://wildlabs.net/funding-opportunity/wildlabs-awards-2026-express-your-interest-now

Deadline 18 March 2026

Caterpillars hear through tiny body hairs, which could inspire improved microphones No ears, no problem. The tobacco hornworm caterpillar, a common garden pest, can actually detect airborne sound via microscopic hairs on its body, according to a team of faculty and graduate students at Binghamton University. The research could have implications for improving microphone technology.

No ears, no problem. The tobacco hornworm caterpillar can detect airborne sound via microscopic hairs on its body, according to a team at Binghamton University: https://phys.org/news/2026-01-caterpillars-tiny-body-hairs-microphones.html

Research presented at the 6th Joint Meeting ASA and ASJ

Our new paper is out today in Animal Behaviour: "Hushed disputes between noisy neighbours: Ovenbirds vary song amplitude during conflicts with territorial rivals." By Connor Acorn, Jenn Foote, & me. @animbehsociety.bsky.social

How loud is an Ovenbird's song? It depends...
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I'm interested in particular in the temporal structure of acoustic information (e.g. vocalizations over time, etc), but I'm very keen in learning what's been developed in the more general space of these long recordings

recorders are sometimes attached to non-human animals (or left in the environment). This generates day- even week-long recordings. I want to learn more about the methods used to analyze such data. Pointers? @animal-prattle.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @manymindspod.bsky.social

C'mon people, let's show some love for a first paper

bro I didn't even know Eastern Bristlebirds existed 5 minutes ago, awesome name by the way and now I'm learning about their song structure and dialects?

#prattle 💬
#bioacoustics

Complex Social Vocalizations are Integrated into the Bat Wingbeat Cycle during Flight Acoustic communication plays a central role in animal social behavior and exhibits remarkable complexity in various taxa. In bats, the emission of echolocation calls is tightly coupled to wingbeat and respiratory rhythms. However, little is known about how complex social vocalizations are coordinated with the mechanics for powered flight. We investigated how complex social calls are integrated into flight of wild Nathusius' pipistrelles (Pipistrellus nathusii). Using synchronized audio and video recordings, we quantified wingbeat rhythms during free flight and incorporated these data into a kinematic inference model to reconstruct the timing of social calls relative to the wingbeat. We found that echolocation call emission is coupled to the upstroke phase of the wingbeat. Moreover, social calls span three wingbeat cycles during flight and are embedded within a continuous sequence of echolocation calls. While motif durations scale with syllable number, motif onsets are phase-locked to narrow, preferential phases of the wingbeat cycle. Our findings provide evidence that complex social calls in bats are integrated into the wingbeat during flight, demonstrating that vocal-locomotor coupling extends beyond echolocation to shape the structure of social communication. By mitigating the high energetic costs of vocalizing, biomechanical integration might have facilitated the evolution of complex vocal communication in bats.

Complex Social Vocalizations are Integrated into the Bat Wingbeat Cycle during Flight bioRxivpreprint