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A new analysis in Science of more than 116,000 bird songs has revealed that the astonishing variety of passerine birdsong is built from just eight basic acoustic motifs, like trills, whistles, and harmonic notes. https://scim.ag/4ft2KBF

Thanks Bárbara!!

BBC coverage of the xeno-cantified Science paper: bbc.com/news/article... #bioacoustics

13/ And obviously, none of this exists without @xeno-canto.bsky.social and the thousands of people who record and share bird sounds there. Thank you.

I had the pleasure to write a commentary in Science about the very comprehensive paper by @quentinbacquele.bsky.social et al. (same issue), on the factors influencing birdsong across the world. Link to my commentary: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/..., originally paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

12/ A collaboration of @ephe-psl.bsky.social EPHE PSL University, ENES Bioacoustics Lab Saint-Étienne University, CEFE Montpellier University, @cnrs.fr CNRS, @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social University of California Berkeley.

11/ Paper: "The global biogeography of passerine songs" by Quentin Bacquelé, Jean-Yves Barnagaud, Cyrille Violle, Frédéric Theunissen and Nicolas Mathevon. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239. Listen to the 8 motifs and explore the map: acoustic-biogeography.vercel.app

10/ The takeaway: birdsong is vast but not endless. It settles into a small, finite set of sounds, set by a trade-off between saying more and travelling far.

9/ In temperate forests, information wins. Birds hold small territories, breed in a short window, and compete hard for mates. The listener is close, so richer, more complex songs pay off.

8/ Geography splits the two. In the rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and Southeast Asia, transmission wins. Simple motifs dominate: flat whistles and slow trills.

7/ To test this, we modeled how sound travels through real environments. Dense, humid forest scatters sound and fills the silences between notes with echoes. Simple motifs survive that journey. Complex ones fall apart.

6/ A complex, modulated, information-rich song says more, but it degrades fast as it travels. A simple song says less, but it survives the trip. So every species faces a trade-off between how much a song says and how far it carries.

5/ Here is the key idea. A song has to do two things at once. Carry information (which species, which bird, how good a singer) and reach a listener who may be far away. These two goals pull against each other.

4/ The 8 motifs: three trills (slow, fast, ultrafast), three whistles (flat, sliding, warbling), plus harmonic stacks and rough noisy notes. Each species uses about 5. Two-thirds of songs mix several.

3/ Then we let a machine learning model group the songs by similarity, with no labels and no target. The songs did not spread out evenly. They piled up around 8 points. We call these 8 poles the acoustic motifs.

2/ We analyzed 116,000+ songs from 3,160 songbird species. First we measured the texture of each one: how its pitch slides up and down, and how its rhythm changes through time. We used a tool from auditory neuroscience, the modulation power spectrum.

1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found: