1/5 What counts as a communicative interaction? This was a recurring question at the recent Computational and Mechanistic Analyses of Communicative Interactions symposium, where ESP's Maddie Cusimano and @loganjames.bsky.social presented their research on carrion crow and zebra finch communication.

CBC Quirks and Quarks did an extended piece on our recent Science paper about beauty in animal vocalizations. alongside the science this also featuried postdoc @loganjames.bsky.social and yours truly producing animal vocalizations ourselves (lol)

Enjoyed diving into the fascinating work by @loganjames.bsky.social et al. on shared preferences between human and non-human animals Liked it so much, we wrote an eLetter, now posted in Science 😅 Our take? There's another side to acoustic preferences worth exploring: idiosyncratic taste

Thank you NPR for this great coverage of our research!! you can read the paper here: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Super excited about this new paper! and eternally grateful to the amazing coauthors, the wonderful network of colleagues who gave us stimuli, and all of the thousands of people that listened to animal sounds for us!

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.

check out this fun video about my recent bat project!

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 💬

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/...

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.

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