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Quentin Bacquelé

@quentinbacquele.bsky.social

241 followers 187 following 14 posts

PhD Student in Acoustic Communication of Birds 🐦‍⬛, Biogeography 🌍 & Artificial Intelligence EPHE - ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab - CEFE quentinbacquele.vercel.app

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Quentin Bacquelé @quentinbacquele.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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.

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Quentin Bacquelé @quentinbacquele.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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.

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Quentin Bacquelé @quentinbacquele.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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.

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Quentin Bacquelé @quentinbacquele.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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.

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Quentin Bacquelé @quentinbacquele.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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.

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Quentin Bacquelé @quentinbacquele.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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:

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