Behavioural and Acoustics Research for K9 Sounds

Student opportunities (BSc / MSc / Internships)
Interested in dog vocal communication, emotion, or dog–human interaction?
Join our research group for a short research stay in ethology, bioacoustics & neuroscience .

DM us or write us an email to barks.lab.elte@gmail.com
#interships #students

Thank you for supporting us throughout 2025! Check out our little sum up of it!
We can't wait to see the exciting studies and experiences 2026 has to offers! ✨

Csenge Reisinger, who is doing her master’s thesis with us, participated in the student competition at the Vet Uni of Budapest last week and she absolutely shined!
🥉 3rd place in the Basic Science section
🏅 Award of the Department of Zoology & the Hungarian Natural History Museum

Congratulations🎉👏🌟

We are spending a fantastic weekend in Szeged at the MET (the Hungarian National Ethology Conference).

We brought many exciting topics with us!
Check out our posters!
#vocalizations #ethology #behaviour

Scientists wanted to know if dogs could one day talk—here’s what they found Tamás Faragó told Newsweek: "We should look at their behavior, how they interact with humans and how they live together with us."

Our "Talking dogs" review has been featured in @newsweek.com :)

Thank you for the opportunity to share our work with the world .

www.newsweek.com/dogs-etholog...

📢Meet us!!

Paula @paulapefraga.bsky.social is a postdoctoral researcher on the behaviour team.
She is interested in animal–human communication and emotions. Her research explores how physiology, vocalizations, and behaviour connect.

You can easily find her hiking in the mountains with her dogs.

Do you want to help us with our new study?🐕🎤

A new dog vocalization questionnaire is available! How well can you differentiate dogs based on their growls?

Find out by filling out our new questionnaire!
Click on this link: barks-lab.elte.hu/queries/grow...

📢Meet us!!

We’re kicking off our intro series with our PI, Tamás Faragó, PhD, @tamsa42.bsky.social who founded BARKS Lab.🎉

Fascinated by canine vocal communication, during his career Tamás studied growls, barks, whines...

Now, he is exploring vocal learning in dogs, the core of our research!

The Talking Dog Dream: What Science Says About It

The press release for our "Talking dogs" review.

🐕🎤

ethology.elte.hu/en/content/t...

Last Friday the Dept. of Ethology held the Dog Ethology Conference 🐾 for the owners who volunteer in our studies.

Our postdoc Rita Lenkei spoke about our review of “Talking Dogs,” PhD student Balázs Szigeti volunteered, and PhD student Franceska Furik was in the organizing team.

#DogScience

Last week at the International Bioacoustics Congress in Kerteminde, the Barks Lab team shared some of our work 🐕🔊

We presented 2 posters and a lively talk :)

We also loved catching up with colleagues, making new connections, and getting inspired by the latest in #bioacoustics!

Bridging Brains and Bioacoustics seminar for Thursday, September 25th at 10:00 EST From Rada Mihalcea and Álvaro Vega-Hidalgo: Cross-Species AI Models for Decoding Animal Communication From Tamás Faragó: Mapping dogs' vocal repertoires

Bridging Brains and Bioacoustics is back!

Please join us next week for fantastic talks from speakers Rada Mihalcea, Álvaro Vega-Hidalgo, and Tamás Faragó

@barkslab.bsky.social
@radamihalcea.bsky.social

🗓️September 25th 10:00 EST
✅ Register here: braincoustics.com

#bioacoustics
#neuroskyence

Companion pigs alternate orientation between humans and snout-inaccessible targets | Royal Society Open Science Previous research on intensely human-socialized pigs found no evidence for orientation alternations to direct human attention to an inaccessible target, the benchmark behaviour that in many other spec...

This might be my last dog–pig comparative study (or who knows?).

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

#dogethology #dogcommunication #bioacousticsresearch #canineethology | Dogs and Science What can your dog’s barks and growls really tell you? At the Canine Science Forum 2025, our Social Media Manager, Jennifer Somers, sat down with canine ethologist and bioacoustician Dr. Tamás Faragó...

Our P.I., and dog vocalization expert @tamsa42.bsky.social gave this nice interview during #CSF2025

Check it out if you are curious about our work on dog vocal communication and vocal learning :)

www.linkedin.com/posts/dogs-a...

Let’s talk about “talking” dogs! Reviewing the science behind a bold idea - Biologia Futura The concept of a “talking” dog has long fascinated humans, as presented throughout history in pieces of folklore, literature, and other fields of culture. While speech, as we know, is a uniquely human...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our first paper is out!!🐕🎤

Talking dogs? How realistic is it?
We explore the scientific, cultural, and technological aspects of speech-like communication in dogs, and argue that while they excel at human-directed communication, spoken language may not be feasible or even desirable.

#dogscience

Thanks a lot :) !

We are happy to introduce ourselves to the research community. Who are we? What do we do?
📍 BARKS Lab is a research group at the Department of Ethology, ELTE University.
🐕 We’re exploring vocal learning in dogs, backed by an ERC Consolidator Grant
#ethology #animalbehaviour #caninescience #vocal