Screenshot of an eLetter posted in Science, on April 13, 2026, titled "Shared and unique taste in acoustic preferences.", as a reply to the James et al. (2026, Science) study, which showed humans share acoustic preferences with other animals. The eLetter reanalyses data and finds that only 30% of repeatable variance in acoustic preferences is shared across humans, while 70% is unique to the individual listener. The eLetter concludes that acoustic preferences are predominantly idiosyncratic, and call for focus also on what makes individual taste unique.

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

@npr.org

@mehr.nz @courtneybhilton.bsky.social @sakatalab.bsky.social @sarahcwoolley.bsky.social

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.

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

I was born near Seattle and my brother lives in Coupeville for what it’s worth haha

@robinmting.bsky.social @reichertfroglab.bsky.social

THANKS SO MUCH: Elizabeth Adkins-Regan, Jaime Bosch, Katherine Buchanan, Bruce Byers, Morgan Gustison, Albertine Leitão, Stefan Leitner, Stephen Nowicki, Bret Pasch, Susan Peters, Michael Reichert, Michael Ritchie, Michael Ryan, Ryan Taylor, Robin Tinghitella, Michelle Tomaszycki, Eric-Marie Vallet

@sakatalab.bsky.social @sarahcwoolley.bsky.social @mehr.nz @courtneybhilton.bsky.social Mike Ryan and more!

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.

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...

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 ...

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 is key for survival and can determine adult responses, ...

You can find the paper in Proc B here @royalsociety.org

These bats learn to eavesdrop—in order to survive The love songs of these Panamanian frogs is a dinner bell for fringe-lipped bats. But how do they learn which frogs and toads are safe to eat and which are poisonous?

and it got a really lovely write-up in National Geographic! such a dream come true

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.

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