Temporal context may aid automated bat-species classification, but the contribution of specific features remains unclear. We investigated whether variation in the interpulse interval (IPI)-the time between consecutive call onsets-provides species-discriminative information and whether transformer-based models are more sensitive to this information than convolutional neural networks. We created two matched datasets from European bat recordings: a natural-IPI condition retaining the original call timing and a normalized-IPI condition in which call onsets were spaced at 50-ms intervals. EfficientNet-B0 and PaSST were fine-tuned and evaluated within each condition. In an additional experiment, each architecture was trained separately on natural-IPI and normalized-IPI recordings, and evaluated on the same natural-IPI test set. Finally, the pretrained classifiers BatDetect2 and BAT were evaluated on both conditions. Within-condition IPI normalization had model-dependent effects. PaSST accuracy differed little between the natural-IPI ($71 \pm 2.3\%$) and normalized-IPI ($70 \pm 6.3\%$) conditions, whereas EfficientNet accuracy increased from $47 \pm 4.7\%$ to $57 \pm 3.9\%$. PaSST exceeded EfficientNet under both conditions. In the cross-condition evaluation, models trained on natural-IPI recordings outperformed those trained on normalized-IPI recordings on the natural-IPI test set: accuracy decreased from 54% to 50% for EfficientNet and from 65% to 57% for PaSST. BatDetect2 and BAT differed little between IPI conditions. Overall, we found limited support for the hypotheses that natural IPI variation contributes substantially to bat-species classification and that it is used more effectively by transformer-based than CNN-based models. Nevertheless, the cross-condition performance decrease shows that results obtained under normalized conditions may not transfer fully to natural recordings.

Vocal communication is a conserved vertebrate social behavior that begins at birth with the cries of infants. These neonatal vocal signals vary across contexts to elicit parental care that matches inf...

Scientific Reports - Dogs’ reactions to motivations and emotions in conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations

Changes in marine animal communities shape ecological processes and ecosystem functioning. Monitoring temporal community dynamics is increasingly important under global change, yet remains challenging...

The workshop aims to provide a venue for researchers working on computational analysis of sound events and scene analysis to present and discuss their results. The 11th Workshop on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events, DCASE 2026, will be held in Boston on 28-29 October. It is co-organized …

Humans organize social interactions in part by referring to others using proper names (hereafter “names”). Names might also facilitate the complex social lives of animals. Several animal species produ...

Tasks We are excited to announce the 2026 BioDCASE task line up! Multi-Channel Alignment Alignment Task 1 Bioacoustic and environmental recordings are often captured using multiple devices operating simultaneously, for example with passive autonomous recorders or animal-borne loggers. When such recordings are not temporally aligned, analyses that rely on relative …

Learning by imitation is the foundation for verbal and musical expression, but its underlying neural basis remains obscure. A juvenile male zebra finch imitates the multisyllabic song of an adult tutor in a process that depends on a song-specialized cortico-basal ganglia circuit, affording a powerful system to identify the synaptic substrates of imitative motor learning. Plasticity at a particular set of cortico-basal ganglia synapses is hypothesized to drive rapid learning-related changes in song before these changes are subsequently consolidated in downstream circuits. Nevertheless, this hypothesis is untested and the synaptic locus where learning initially occurs is unknown. By combining a computational framework to quantify song learning with synapse-specific optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and directly downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit, we identified the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapses that drive the acquisition and expression of rapid vocal changes during juvenile song learning and characterized the hours-long timescale over which these changes consolidate. Furthermore, transiently augmenting postsynaptic activity in the basal ganglia briefly accelerates learning rates and persistently alters song, demonstrating a direct link between basal ganglia activity and rapid learning. These results localize the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapses that enable a juvenile songbird to learn to sing and reveal the circuit logic and behavioral timescales of this imitative learning paradigm. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Institutes of Health, K99 NS144525 (DCS), F32 MH132152 (DCS), F31 HD098772 (SB), R01 NS099288 (RM), RF1 NS118424 (RM and JP)

Scientific Data - CORVIDATA: A global dataset of morphology, ecology, sociality, and life-history in Corvidae

PDF | On Dec 8, 2025, Baudewijn Odé and others published A list of sound producing European grasshoppers and the availability of their sounds in Xeno-canto | Find, read and cite all the research you n...

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is a useful non-destructive tool for evaluating species presence, diversity and abundance. However, in marine environments, a dearth of tools and methods for identif....

Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pipie...

A warm October evening in this region is when one is more likely to hear the midwife toad (Alytes) because, even though they can sing throughout the summer, here in Alentejo, the months between June…

Neural mechanisms underlying auditory restoration are not fully understood. Here authors show that, neural populations of the zebra finch in the equivalent of auditory cortex respond to song with deleted syllables as if the missing syllables were actually present, indicating that information about the temporal structure of song is stored in this area. Their findings suggest that the internal model has a generalized representation of species-typical syntax.