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Reposted by Quentin Bacquelé

Science Magazine @science.org · 24/07/2026

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. scim.ag/4ft2KBF

scim.ag

The global biogeography of passerine songs

Although bird songs are classic models for understanding the evolution of vocal communication, their global diversity has long made the development of a unifying framework challenging. By analyzing th...

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Quentin Bacquelé @quentinbacquele.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

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.

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Reposted by Quentin Bacquelé

Elodie Mandel-Briefer @ebriefer.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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/...

science.org

Birdsong diversity across the world

Birdsong motifs are shaped by evolutionary history, biological traits, and environmental constraints

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

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.

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

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

science.org

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

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.

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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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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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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