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)

June 6: Humans and animals love the same sounds… | CBC Radio

The brain rewires itself to multitask, fast animals experience time in slow motion, an archival excerpt about a Russian space mirror and what physicists might build next to shed light on the unknown u...

cbc.ca

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...

Humans and animals find the same sounds 'beautiful'

Charles Darwin theorized that a sound, smell or color that's attractive to one species can be preferred by others too. A new study finds humans and animals do share preferences for certain sounds.

npr.org

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!

samuel mehr@mehr.nz · 5mo ago

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

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!

The Conversation U.S.@us.theconversation.com · 12mo ago

🦇 Baby bats almost get themselves killed while learning to listen for the right prey to hunt. Smithsonian researcher Logan S. James and his team spent decades studying these acoustic assassins in Panama and the results were wild. #bats #science #predators #frogs

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/...

The ontogeny of decision-making in an eavesdropping predator | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Predators use prey-emitted cues to assess and localize potential food sources. Sexual advertisement calls offer conspicuous cues for eavesdropping predators. While the ontogeny of predatory behaviour ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

my most recent paper just came out! we wrote a news story about the article here:

Young bats learn to be discriminating when listening for their next meal

By listening to a frog call, adult bats can tell which prey are palatable and which are poisonous. Young bats must acquire this ability over time.

theconversation.com

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

arXiv cs.SD Sound@cssd-bot.bsky.social · last yr.

Louis Mahon, Benjamin Hoffman, Logan S James, Maddie Cusimano, Masato Hagiwara, Sarah C Woolley, Olivier Pietquin: Robust detection of overlapping bioacoustic sound events https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02389 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02389 https://arxiv.org/html/2503.02389

Very cool to see some of my work in collaboration with the Earth Species Project getting featured in this article!

Earth Species Project (ESP)@earthspecies.bsky.social · 2y ago

Zebra finches are nuanced communicators. In partnership with @loganjames.bsky.social & Sarah Woolley, we’re building AI models to decode their vocalizations. apnews.com/article/arti... (Big thanks to @reidhoffman.bsky.social & @waverleystreet.bsky.social for making this work possible).

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,

Gretchen McCulloch@gretchenmcculloch.com · 3y ago

Definitely not what a word is either, we don't know that one (Source: I'm a linguist)

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