Logan James interprets animal song (he's a biologist)

[00:00:00] Yes, I would actually just live in houses in the town of Gamboa. It was originally built during the building of the canal. It's right on the canal. And then now it's just a normal town. But it has, you know, these some really, really nice houses, actually. But so it's honestly, it's fieldwork, technically, but in reality, I have like, you know, high speed internet and everything I could need in a cell signal. I mean, it's really not. This is fieldwork. People live there. It's normal. Yeah, you're not roughing it.

[00:00:29] No. Hi, I'm Rachel Moeller Gorman. I'm a science writer and I interview scientists about their research. But I've always wanted to pry a little deeper and ask more personal questions like, what were you like as a kid? What happens when you make mistakes? Why should the rest of us care about your research? I can't wait to ask these questions and many more on Socializing with Scientists.

[00:00:58] Hello, and welcome to Socializing with Scientists. It has been a few weeks since I've posted an episode. I aspire to post every week, but with other work and real life, I can't always make that happen. I'm excited to be back today with Logan James. He is a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal, and he enthusiastically studies the sounds that animals make.

[00:01:20] This could be the trills of the tree frog, the chirp of crickets, or the songs of birds. He has a fascinating new study that uses an online game to ask a bunch of people whether they agree with the animal's assessment of which songs are more attractive than others.

[00:01:34] And in some ways, Logan James' research kind of gets at the age-old question of does universal beauty exist? Are our sensory systems somehow primed to acknowledge it or seek it out and why? Or does beauty signify something else, something practical like health? Logan is humble, smart, super excited to sit and observe the animals in the world around us, and I really liked getting to know him a little bit. I think you will too. So here we go with Logan James.

[00:02:03] Well, welcome. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. It's really great to have you here. The first question I always ask is, what kind of scientist are you? And then can you maybe talk a little bit about what that means and what you do? Yeah, so I work in biology, studying animal communication. And in particular, I study the sounds that animals make and the way that other animals perceive and respond to those different kinds of sounds.

[00:02:28] Okay. And I found your work because I just saw your research paper that you wrote called Humans Share Acoustic Preferences with Other Animals. And I was just super intrigued by that. First, it was a pretty simple title compared to a lot of other research papers I think that I've read.

[00:02:43] Could you just briefly explain what that means in general before even delving into your research itself? But what are these acoustic preferences? What are they just sounds? Is it music? Is it like chirping? Like what are what do you mean by that? Yeah, so these sounds are generally short little calls or songs that animals produce. And these are done in sort of courtship context with the goal of attracting a potential mate.

[00:03:11] And what we found is that in some cases within a species, there tend to be preferences for certain sounds over others. These are not sort of universal, but they're just sort of these common preferences or tendencies. And when we asked humans what they thought of these different sounds that have been previously tested on animals, we found that they often shared the same preferences as those original animals from previous research.

[00:03:36] Okay, so is it do you know what it is about these sounds that people and animals both like? So not totally we have some for in some cases, but there was some sort of clear evidence. In particular, we found that when animals add what we call acoustic adornments. So these are little extra bits like chucks or chirps or trills or clicks, these extra short sounds, the animals tended to like them.

[00:04:04] And so did the humans in our study. However, we didn't find like a clear acoustic feature that explained the preferences of either animals or humans across the whole data set. So there wasn't some magic feature that seemed to sort of stand out. And I suspect that a lot of it was pretty context specific. And what I mean by that is that within each pair of sounds, people might be attending to different sorts of features depending on the overall structure of those sounds.

[00:04:30] And so, you know, when you're listening to two cricket sounds, you're going to be assessing them in a very different way than when you listen to two bird songs, for example. So it was lots of different types of animals these sounds came from. It wasn't just birds. Yeah, exactly. We had 16 species that included a fair number of frogs, which is what I've actually studied those preferences in in the past, as well as birds, some mammals, and then a couple insects as well.

[00:04:57] So why in animals? Is it purely just for mating that they make sounds and hear sounds or is it? And then what does that signify when they like one sound over another sound? Yeah. So, I mean, animals make sounds to convey a multitude of messages. And this is really broad, you know, and I've studied this in many different contexts, but this can include courtship, but also, you know, alarm or social affiliation or distress or begging calls for food.

[00:05:26] So there's a lot of different ways that animals use sound. But when we think about these acoustic preferences, it usually is in a courtship sort of a mating context that we see animals express these kinds of preferences. So it's purely for survival then, for passing on their genes, these preferences? Right. No. So that is like one hypothesis that these preferences may convey some benefit to the animal that's choosing among different options.

[00:05:54] However, the evidence is actually really not very clear for that. So people have these ideas about, you know, honest signaling, for example, the idea that the sounds that an animal makes conveys something about, you know, how good that animal will be for passing on good genes or something along those lines. But actually, when you dig into that, it maybe works occasionally in a specific species. But when you try to apply that more broadly, I find that often there's really not good evidence that this is a broad pattern across species.

[00:06:24] Instead, I think these preferences arise from many, many sort of interacting factors. And they're sort of idiosyncratic and varying across species. And I don't think there's some simple reason that these acoustic preferences exist. And I think that our study sort of speaks to that because, you know, we aren't assessing the crickets when we listen to them and their ability to, you know, we don't care whether the cricket is better or not for passing on their genes.

[00:06:54] And yet we sometimes have these same preferences as the animals. And so I think that there's some of them, at least some aspects of these preferences likely arises due to just sort of biases and predispositions and the way that our sensory system is just generally perceived sounds. Is it that like some animals are more charismatic or able to kind of manipulate what they know that other animals will find attractive?

[00:07:19] And so even though they might not have better genes or be more healthy, they somehow figured out how to take advantage of that system where other animals appreciate this kind of beauty or charisma in a certain way. I don't know if I'm asking this properly. Yeah, I mean, to some degree, for sure.

[00:07:35] So that kind of can happen on even like an evolutionary timescale where sometimes there's sort of this runaway selection or where these signals evolve that are attractive, but then the receivers continue to want even larger and grander types of sounds. And, you know, the classic sort of example of this that people give is the peacock's tail where it sort of goes and goes and goes to be ever bigger and larger. But this can happen in sound as well.

[00:08:02] But again, this is not something that happens across outer species or across the board. And there's often sort of upper limits to how the higher quality that can actually be and other factors that may sort of reduce the extent to which animals continuously get more and more attractive. At some point, maybe later, we can dig into some of the research I do in frogs.

[00:08:26] But in that case, the same sounds that are attractive to females are also attractive to potential predators, including the frog eating bat. And so these males produce really, really, you know, the more and more and more attractive calls, they also risk getting eaten. So there's definitely an upper limit to how much they want to do that. So then in your study, you found that humans also prefer the same types of sounds that these animals prefer.

[00:08:54] So is it somehow genetic or it's in like the sensory systems as they've evolved? It's maintained this ability to prefer certain types of sounds? Yeah, exactly. I mean, not necessarily genetic, but definitely we think that there may be some sort of fundamental biases in sound perception and processing that we share with other animals, maybe through common descent, but also maybe just through convergent evolution in the sense that, you know, at the end of the day,

[00:09:22] the goal of a hearing system is to detect these vibrations in the air that cause sound. And so there's only so many ways to do that. So the sensory systems are actually quite similar in the sort of baseline way that they process sound. And so we think that maybe biases stemming from that lead to these sort of larger similarities. Okay, I did. I listened to a couple of the sounds. I think it was on the article that you wrote or your website.

[00:09:51] And I listened to the two sounds from some kind of bird. And it was really blatant, like that one sound just sounded so much nicer than the other sound. I was trying to figure out why. Is it that it's more harmonious or less like the second one sounded kind of discordant or harsh or grating somehow?

[00:10:16] Like, is it that some of them just sound better put together and more harmonious and the other sounds are just more discordant? I don't know. Like what? What is that? Yeah, I know. It's a great question. And it's something we don't really know. So I agree in that example. There are in different examples, you kind of pick up on different things that you might that might explain it.

[00:10:37] But we haven't sort of systematically tested that, nor have we asked people, you know, these follow up questions after they choose, you know, asking them why they think they chose and what that might say about it. So there's a lot more to do and a lot more that we're interested to understand about these sort of findings. So, you know, we have this this finding that we agree, but then the why of it is still very much an exciting thing to pursue.

[00:11:03] Yeah. Yeah. And you wrote in your paper that Darwin said humans and animals share a taste for the beautiful. So by bringing that idea of beauty into it, too, it makes it seem somehow, I don't know, more than just science-y or genetic or whatever. It feels like there's something more spiritual there. Is that taking it too far? No, I mean, I agree. I think this project is in some ways was always kind of a side endeavor, right?

[00:11:28] It's not like based on some fundamental like, you know, it's not it's not it's not it's not different from the other research that I do and that it is sort of asking this sort of deeper, broader and in some ways very simple question. And I think what it does for me, it does, I think, speak to a broader audience in the sense that like many people, I think maybe all people find a lot of beauty in nature.

[00:11:53] You know, when you think about colors on birds or butterflies or smells of flowers or the, you know, the sounds of birds and other animals like these are all things that evolved to be attractive to other animals, but not specifically humans. Right. They're meant to attract members of the same or maybe other species, you know, flowers are meant to attract bees and other pollinators. And we're not bees or other pollinators. And yet they still find these things beautiful.

[00:12:17] And so I think it reminds us that these sort of fundamental building blocks of our sensory systems are shared with other animals. And so we get to sort of enjoy some of the same things that they do. Yeah. And it was also interesting how you did this study, right? It was kind of a gamified study where you had people online play a game. Can you just talk a little bit about how you did it? Yeah, exactly.

[00:12:46] So this was the sort of the I collaborated with someone, Sam Mayer, who is a professor working in auditory cognition and perception of music. And so this was he has this great platform where people can go and do these sort of studies that are just inherently engaging. And so some of them, you know, will give you a score or something. Ours was a little less clear, but we did tell you at the end, you know, which animals you sounded you were most similar to in your practice.

[00:13:13] So you could be a frog or a mammal or a bird or an insect. So that made it a little bit fun. But in general, people just like listening to these sounds and thinking about them and giving their judgments. It's sort of inherently rewarding, it seemed like. And so that was really useful for us because it allowed us to sort of get at a large number of people and a sort of diverse pool. I mean, you know, there's always going to be biases in the samples of the people that engage in research.

[00:13:40] But certainly we were able to get a wide range of people involved in the research, which is very cool. How did you get these people? How do they know about the study? So a lot of it's really just word of mouth. At this point, you know, I think it's also nice that Sam Merritt's platform, he's been doing these sort of studies for a while. So people will get excited when a new one's up and they'll engage with it. People will then share their, you know, their output on things like social media, you know, and other sort of just word of mouth ways of getting the word out there.

[00:14:10] How long would it take if someone went online to do the study? Oh, like five minutes or so. Oh, OK. Yeah, short and easy and fun is kind of the goal. Yeah. So you just presented two sounds to them and they picked. So there were like a series of two sounds. Exactly. We would play two sounds in succession and then ask them if they preferred the first or the second. And it's actually still online and able to be played. So I can send you that link as well. Yeah, great. Did they?

[00:14:38] And that there was no option to say why they prefer to sound? Exactly. We found that like, I mean, this is, you know, the benefit of collaborating with a psychologist who's used to studying human responses. But that, you know, in these sort of contexts, if you start to ask too many questions, people might lose interest and stop participating. And in particular, I think that that one is hard, at least from my own just sort of perspective that when I think about, oh, when you listen to these sounds, they're weird and you may not really know why you feel something.

[00:15:07] And I think asking you to try to describe something that's really unclear can also be kind of frustrating or just disengaging. And so I think for some of those follow-ups, we may want to do some more sort of the traditional controlled laboratory type studies where we really sit with people and, you know, get a more robust data sample from each individual rather than a really broad sample. Yeah, maybe overthinking it too. You just want that first gut reaction. Exactly that. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:36] I was going to say, like, is it, you don't know this, but would you be interested in knowing if it's like if it's a softer sound versus louder or a certain rhythm or lack of rhythm? Or like we said, if it's like a consonant chord progression versus like a discordant amount of music? I mean, those are all interesting. Yeah, exactly. We have some hypotheses based on research in humans about what sounds we like and don't like, and especially with related to music and discordance and stuff like that.

[00:16:04] So we did measure some of those properties of the sounds. Nothing panned out. Like nothing was very clear when we did some of these basic measurements in part because they aren't really tailored to measure these kinds of animal sounds sometimes. So some of them don't even really work when you're measuring like the clicks of a cricket compared to a bird song. And even the bird song is really different from music. So anyways, we didn't find any evidence for those sorts of things yet. But we also like to have, you know, we don't have the greatest sample to do those sorts of things.

[00:16:32] And so moving forward, we can actually experimentally manipulate the sounds to in particular ways to then get, you know, did this one change to the sound influence the way that humans selected? Okay. And I think you mentioned this, but just to clarify, the sounds that you use have already been studied in animals and kind of recorded from animals in the wild or somewhere. And then you were able to see which one they preferred.

[00:17:00] Like they've already been well studied and that's why you then use them for humans. Yeah, exactly. All of those sounds were, most of them were directly tested on animals themselves in previous research. Some of them are just like in the same category, very similar to sounds that have been used in the past when we weren't able to get the original recordings. But yeah, all of them are ones that we have behavioral evidence from real animals, you know, the other animals for what they prefer.

[00:17:30] I was hoping maybe just to step back a little bit and talk about you and where you came from and how you got interested in all of this. Like where did you grow up? What were you like as a kid? Were you always interested in animals and animal communication? Yeah, yeah. I grew up mostly in Colorado near the mountains. And so I think, you know, easy to as a young kid to be interested in nature and animals in general. You know, we had bears in our backyard and things like that.

[00:17:58] So it was definitely, I always was just very interested in animals and kind of just curious about what they were doing. And so I, you know, I think in high school, maybe I volunteered to do some like prairie dog censusing in Colorado too. So just sort of, we just, you know, watched them and counted them a couple of times in the morning. So simple things like that always just kind of got me interested in the idea of research and the idea of thinking about what animals are doing.

[00:18:27] Like were you the kind of kid that would just go outside and play and watch animals or were you like more studious? Did you read a lot of books? Just what, you know, when you were younger, what did you like to do? Yeah, definitely. I was more into just going out and just kind of running around the backyard and the mountains and seeing what was going on out there. I wasn't that, but yeah, I mean, I liked school just fine throughout my life, but it wasn't that it was really being out there that kind of drew me into it in the first place. Yeah.

[00:18:56] Were you near like the Rocky Mountains? Like what part of Colorado was it? Yeah, exactly. Just in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. So we'd go there often. Yeah. Did you just go hiking a lot and go like camping and things? Yeah, exactly. I hike and camp all the, you know, throughout the summer and everything growing up. And I still go back where my family, a lot of my family lives there still. So we try to make it out each summer to do something in the mountains as well. Where are you now? So now I'm based in Montreal.

[00:19:27] Yeah, I came here for undergrad and then I, and grad school. And then I was also based out of Texas and Panama throughout my, some of my post-docing. And now I'm back in Montreal. Did you go to college for science or did you kind of discover you wanted to do science once you were in college? Yeah. So, you know, I kind of knew that I liked studying. I think if I liked animals and I liked biology in general.

[00:19:52] And so I kind of, I, when I went to McGill for undergrad, I did go straight into a biology curriculum, which was great. But then I think quickly I realized I wanted to make sure that I had time to explore lots of different areas. And so I was kind of lucky that I was able to take basically a year of just random electives. And so I did, you know, a meteorology course, some psychology, what else? A couple of just, you know, things kind of off the wall to kind of get a sense for what I might like as well.

[00:20:21] And it was actually the intro to linguistics class that just immediately got me. I was completely sold by that topic. I really, really enjoyed the class and ended up doing a degree then in both biology and linguistics in the end, which I think really naturally led to this thinking about animal communication, right? I mean, and a lot of my work really does relate to human communication and the attempts to sort of position our own communication systems within a broader biological context.

[00:20:50] So this is probably a silly question, but it's, McGill, do you have to speak French? Are you speaking French in classes there? No, it's not a silly question at all. But no, there are two English universities in Montreal, McGill and Concordia. They're both great. And so, yeah, my classes were all in English, but... They were? All right. Did you, I mean, did you know French also? I mean, I guess to live there, it might be... Yeah, I mean, no, my French is unfortunately not great. The city itself is quite bilingual.

[00:21:17] The Quebec government would rather it be not, but it still remains, you know, a pretty accepting and diverse city. So anyways, French is definitely necessary to live here for a long time. But... So wait, did you say you went to grad school in McGill also? Exactly. I stayed on after undergrad and went to, did my PhD here as well. All right. And that was in, what was it specifically in? Yeah, it was in biology, working on songbird communication.

[00:21:48] You mentioned Panama. Did you, I think I read too that you studied frogs in Panama. Is that right? How did that come about? Yeah. So after, so, you know, as I was finishing up grad school, I realized that I did really enjoy research and wanted to keep doing it. And so then I had to figure out some post-docing. So find, you know, working, continuing research programs with other professors.

[00:22:13] And there is a researcher based out of UT Austin, Mike Ryan, who was pretty, you know, pretty famous in the animal preference and sexual selection kind of realm and a really wonderful supervisor and mentor. So anyways, I reached out to him and managed to, he ended up having some grant funding so that I could join his lab for my first postdoc.

[00:22:34] And he's been traveling to Panama for decades to study preferences in frogs, as well as these frog eating bats and other animals down there. And so I was able to do a couple of different field seasons and then ended up getting a fellowship to do a full year based out of Panama doing postdocs there. Can you talk a little bit? I think from what I read, you were playing sounds for frogs remotely in the trees at night to see which sounds they would prefer. Is that right?

[00:23:04] Yeah. So this is based in Gambola, Panama, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which is a really cool spot because there's a lot of researchers doing really diverse things. And so you get this really cool community down there, including a bunch of people that work on frog behavior, which is what I was doing. And so what I would do is head out in the early evening and find the female frogs.

[00:23:27] And I would actually bring them instead of doing these in the wild, I would bring them to a little laboratory area that we have down there with a large acoustic chamber, just because the jungle is very loud at night with lots of different animals calling. And so we wanted to make sure that we have a little bit more control over the conditions. So anyways, we put the female into the middle of the chamber and then we play sounds from speakers on opposite sides of the chamber.

[00:23:54] And we have this little kind of like closed couch, like the CCTV system where we can watch her live behavior from outside the chamber. And so I'll just sit there and watch as she hops towards one speaker or the other. And then once she hits the speaker, she's made her choice and I'll go in and grab her. And usually I can actually test them a couple of times in a row on different different sounds so that they're pretty willing to express their preferences that that night.

[00:24:22] And then at the end of the night, I bring them back to where I found them and let them go. Wait, so how do you find them? Like how do you just went into the rainforest? How do you find these female frogs? Yeah. So, I mean, we work with sometimes other species, but the most common species we work with is the chungara frog. And part of the reason for that is that they are a frog that's quite easy to find. They do well in kind of these forest edges, the edge between the city and the forest. It's not really a city, but this town, a small town.

[00:24:52] So there's sort of like drainage ditches and other areas where we know they tend to congregate. And so we really find them by listening to their calls, just like the predatory bats do. If we hear them calling, we go to them. The other benefit of the species is that they make these foam nests. So they lay their eggs in. So they kind of churn up the water and make this big, this really kind of sticky, gross foam that they put the eggs in to help protect them.

[00:25:20] But what that means is that, you know, during the day, if you walk around or drive around, if you spot some foam nests, you know that that's a spot where the frogs were last night. So they're probably going to be there again tonight. So it helps you find potential areas where they're going to be. So we have sort of some spots where we know they tend to be, but then we also will explore and look around for other areas as well. How big are they? Super small, like just teeny, tiny little guys.

[00:25:47] So it has to be at night that you go find them? Yeah. These species, there are some species of frogs that are active during the day, but the ones that we study are active at night. And in particular, we study these female preferences. And so the females, they wait, they kind of hide in the forest floor and among the leaves and stuff like that throughout most of their lives. And then it's the night that her eggs are ready to be fertilized when she's gravid with eggs. That's when she leaves and tries to find a mate.

[00:26:17] And so if you test a female when she's not gravid, she doesn't care about the sound. She won't go to anything. But that one night, if she doesn't find a mate, she will drop her eggs unfertilized, which is a total waste for her, all of the investment she put into growing the eggs. So she really has to find a mate that night. So it's sort of one shot for her. And so she's really motivated to go to these different speakers and to express her preferences because it matters a lot for her then.

[00:26:45] And so I find that also kind of interesting that it's really kind of, you know, it's this one shot. And so that's why these males have to compete because, you know, they need to prove themselves for that one moment when that female is ready. So when you take her away, does she not then get to fertilize her eggs that night? No, she does. So we actually, the way we find females is actually usually after she's found a mate.

[00:27:10] So what happens is she'll bump into a male, he'll hop onto her back and he'll just sit there and they'll just sit there together in this pair. It's called Amplexus. As they wait for the eggs to come out, she doesn't really have a lot of control of it, apparently. So they just kind of sit there waiting. So we find them before the eggs are out, but after she's found a pair, we separate them, do the test and then put them back together and then release them. So they get to, we don't mess up too much of their process.

[00:27:40] So when you're doing this research, are you, are you living in the town? Like, where do you stay and for how long are you out there doing this research? Yeah. So I would, so some people will be based out of their sort of full time. I would generally do shorter field seasons of up to, you know, three weeks to three months is sort of the range. So, yeah, a wide range of timing. But yeah, there's the, there's a various sort of options.

[00:28:04] The stride is the Institute has a lot of different campuses in different areas of the country with different sort of lodging options. But yes, I would actually just live in houses in the town of Gamboa. It was originally built during the building of the canal. It's right on the canal.

[00:28:21] And then now it's just a normal town, but it has, you know, these, some really, really nice houses actually that, um, so it's honestly, it's field work technically, but in reality I have like, you know, I have, uh, uh, you know, high speed internet and everything I could need in the cell signal. I mean, it's really not field work. People live there. It's normal. Yeah. You're not roughing it. No people do. There are other areas, you know, there's this island, there are Colorado Island that you can

[00:28:49] take a, uh, uh, boat to where people live in sort of more traditional sort of research housing. Although even there, it's still, it's all pretty nice, honestly. Do you work together with the other people there, other scientists? Are you like sharing meals or like sharing data or, you know, is it collaborative or is it mostly like a solo thing while you gather your data? Yeah, totally. I mean, it depends on the timing, just sort of who's there by chance sometimes. But yeah, during the summer, there's often a lot of researchers there and whether there's sort of, you know,

[00:29:19] people will give talks and chats and meetups and stuff. There's like weekly happy hours and stuff like that. So there's actually a really awesome community. And I've met some of my, you know, closest friends and colleagues there in various ways. You know, one of my friends was studying these birds called the Tinamuse. And I got to help out with a day of field work on her project and learn about these birds that I'm now really obsessed with and want to study. So it's a really cool community.

[00:29:51] What are you working on now besides what this paper was on? Yeah. So now I've actually, so some of my funding is coming from the Earth Species Project, which is this research nonprofit that's trying to sort of use some of the newer computational techniques and tools to study animal communication in new ways. And so we're working actually with, I'm back with zebra finches, which is the species that I started my research career with.

[00:30:16] And we're looking at these female-female interactions, which are really just these sort of, they just kind of make these short calls. We kind of contact calls all day long. And because they're producing these like so many calls, all, you know, hundreds to even thousands in a day. These are signals that are obviously important because they're producing them a lot, but we don't know much about what their function is or what they're doing.

[00:30:41] And they're tough to study with sort of traditional kinds of tools because you kind of need these long, extended interactions in order to study them. So we're working on building these models that can listen to an individual and then respond in various sort of naturalistic ways so that we can get a sense about what these sort of dynamics are, these vocal exchanges, these kind of conversations back and forth. Wait, say that again? You're building a model or you're trying to replicate the sounds?

[00:31:11] Yeah. So we're building what we call like an interaction model. So it's basically, you know, a series of models on the computer that can listen to a bird live and sort of detect when she's calling. And then based on all the training data that we've fed into it from real interactions between two birds, the model could pretend to be a bird in particular and respond in a way that we predict based on the training.

[00:31:37] So the model will predict like when it thinks it should call and what kind of call it should make based on the behavior of the partner bird that it's interacting with live. So it's kind of replicating an interaction. Is that like a large learning model or AI type stuff? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's using some of the kinds of models that we're hearing a lot about, like large language models and everything like that. It's not using the ones that are trained on human communication specifically. We're training it on the actual zebra finch training or sorry, zebra finch interactions. Yeah.

[00:32:07] So have you started, you've made the model and are using it or you're still making it? Yeah, we actually have, there's a preprint up. And so the work is submitted. It's, we've done, we have our first sort of pass at this where we do have an interaction model that is able to replicate, you know, a bunch of the features.

[00:32:26] And then I think the most sort of important thing that we were able to do is we can break the model in particular ways with like these ablations, what we call them, to see how that, you know, if the model isn't as good of an interaction partner, we can see what's how the bird responds to that to understand what features of the interaction she's actually caring about. Like we're trying to understand what the, what the birds care about and what the birds are doing with these different kinds of interactions.

[00:32:51] And so, you know, we have really simple playbacks where we just repeat, you know, we just randomly produce calls. And the birds, of course, find that strange, I think. And it's just not like a real partner. And so we can kind of compare her behavior with, you know, the simplest models to more complex models and then a live partner. And nothing is as good as a live partner. The bird certainly knows it's not a real bird still. But, you know, we're moving in that direction of like, can we, can we figure out what features of these interactions are important for the birds?

[00:33:20] So are these birds related, the two female birds? Or like, do you have any sense of, are they just saying hello to each other? Are there, is like, what, you have any idea why they're communicating? Yeah, so I, with these, so, you know, if you go, in the wild, these elephants just live in these really large groups, even hundreds of individuals. And when you hear them, there's just like a cacophonous colony of just sounds. They're just constantly making these calls, you know, when it's really, we have, you know, a colony of birds actually at the lab.

[00:33:50] And they're making these just, yeah, always talking to each other and creating this sort of wall of sound. And I think we, you know, it's hard to, to really be clear on what's going on because of just how sort of much sound there is. And so it's hard to pinpoint the function of a given call at a given moment. But what I would, but what people have been finding is that it seems to be really useful for coordination and sort of coordinating the social structure and dynamics of the group. And for individual recognition, they can tell each other apart based on the structures of their calls.

[00:34:20] And so I think that they're really highly social species. And I think that these, these sort of contact calls help maintain the social structure and organization of the group. And so I think when the two birds are doing this, you know, it's as much smaller a scale, but they're just, they're checking in on each other and making sure everything is sort of going fine. I think, you know, if something bad were to happen, which doesn't happen in the, in this case, but, you know, in the wild, if there was a predator or something, they might stop calling, which would be a signal that something is wrong and they need to check in on what's going on.

[00:34:48] So there's this sort of many, many, many different functions of these calls simultaneously. So you're trying to kind of like crack the language of these birds and figure out how to, what exactly every aspect of a sound and communication means? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, the, the goal is to figure out, you know, why are they making the sounds that are making in the given time they're making them?

[00:35:12] Because, you know, they're, they're, they're producing, you know, longer or shorter or louder or softer, you know, different kinds of calls in these interactions. And we're, we're trying to figure out kind of what are the rules that govern these interactions? What, you know, what, when she makes a longer call, why might she do that? And what might that do to the partner? And so we see, you know, maybe some of these things are fairly intuitive. If the bird makes a longer call, the partner is more likely to respond. If she makes a really short call, the partner is less likely to respond to that.

[00:35:39] Cause maybe she's not indicating that she needs a response, you know, with that short little call, but a much longer, louder call is like, okay, I need to check in on you. Can you respond to me? You know, this is a little anthropomorphic of course, but that's sort of the way we're seeing it. Yeah. Like what, I mean, you seem so fascinated by, by language. Like what is it specifically about language that, that fascinates you so much, so much so that you want to learn about it in animals, not even humans. Yeah.

[00:36:04] I mean, I think what I was really struck by when I first started learning about linguistics as a topic was how, you know, we all really easily learned and can produce language, right? It's so second nature and we don't think about it very much. But when we actually try to describe it and characterize like the rules that are, that we're all following all the time, we actually are finding it really difficult to do that.

[00:36:30] And to the point that we, we have, we don't know what the rules are of language still, you know, nothing, no one has been able to perfectly capture the diversity of human languages under one sort of universal framework. People are trying and people have gotten close, but there's a lot of debate and a lot of, it's a contentious field sometimes because people are all, you know, it feels like it's so, it's so close to heart, right? Like we all, we all have our languages.

[00:36:56] And again, we acquire it without any instruction, you know, as, as babies that can do barely anything, we can do that. And so I think it's just, it's just so miraculous that we have this ability to communicate and we don't know how. And I find that just so fascinating and fun to dissect. Yeah. You're, you're a postdoc, right? Exactly. Yeah. My like fourth postdoc, I think. Fourth? Do you hope to have your own lab today?

[00:37:25] Like if you had a grant for as much money as you could ever want, like what would you do with it exactly for, for your research? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, yes, I, I, I'm not exactly sure what path I'm, you know, I'm thinking about professors, but other kinds of research positions as well. You know, working for this nonprofit has been a lot of fun to understand that there are sort of new and other, other avenues to pursue research than just the traditional academia. But all of those are ways that I'm curious about.

[00:37:51] So, and indeed, let's see, if I had a grant, I, maybe I haven't even thought about ambitions of that large, but I mean, I would continue to do the kinds of things I'm doing where I'm looking at, you know, diverse communication systems of animals and trying to understand the principles that underlie all of those different systems. You know, I'm studying these conversational rules and zebra finches, but I'd like to expand that to as many a species as possible.

[00:38:48] I think. Yeah. Would you take it to humans too? Would you somehow study language in humans also? Yeah, I think so. I'm, you know, so, so the sorts of rules that we're measuring in zebra finches, they can actually be applied to human conversation. And I'm planning to do that at some point with some, so there are some datasets that are out there now to sort of see, you know, how similar or different are these back and forth that we do compared to other species.

[00:39:17] I think, and then I also am curious to really expand upon this idea of humans sharing sound preferences with other animals to think about the way that we process other kinds of animal sounds. You know, if an animal is trying to express alarm because there's a predator nearby, can we tell based on the way that that sound sounds? You know, or if an animal is in distress, there are certainly, it seems like we can tell sometimes, you know, what the sounds of other animals mean, but maybe not always.

[00:39:45] And I'm curious to know what those lines are, like which species can we tell what their sounds are sort of used for and which ones can we not? Yeah, and can we hear different, I don't know, frequencies in certain animals? Like I know, aren't dogs supposed to be able to hear higher sounds than we can even hear? Yeah, that's a great point. So the, in our study of animal sounds, like so far, we kept basically all of them in the original frequencies, except for the singing mice, which have, which they produce these higher frequency sounds.

[00:40:16] I can hear them and most, but some people can't, they're a little too high pitched. Some people, and actually as you get older, you will start, you lose your higher frequency hearing. So we, we downshifted those pitches to be more in line with human hearing, the human hearing range.

[00:40:30] And so, you know, moving forward, it would be interesting to, you know, try to put the sounds sort of more within the kind of correct spot in each animal's, you know, or like to kind of morph the frequencies from the animal's hearing range into our hearing range based on kind of the upper and lower limits of each animal's hearing. Certainly, I'd like, I would love to study more of the bat communication system, which some of which is, you know, completely ultrasonic that we would never be able to hear. But if you slow it down or downshift it, it sometimes sounds, you know, like a bird song or something else.

[00:41:00] So. So that's true that some people can hear, one of my kids claims that they can hear really high pitched noises that the dog can also hear. And I'm like, are you serious? Or is this kind of, are you joking with me? But if you're saying that is possible. Absolutely. That's absolutely true. Yeah.

[00:41:17] And you can, I think on YouTube, if you Google like sound hearing or whatever, if you can find a sound where it will just, you know, slowly raise the pitch and you can hear when you stop hearing it and send, you know, if you're in a room with people, people will have different moments where they realize they can't hear anymore.

[00:41:39] So thinking about like broader scientific kind of field questions, what do you, what do you kind of like most every day about your life as a scientist? Like what do you do on a daily basis that you enjoy? And what do you do that's maybe not as much fun? Yeah. I mean, I think for me, I really enjoy and sort of purposefully make sure that I have a real diversity of sort of tasks at any given moment.

[00:42:04] So I like to have projects that are in early stages where I'm developing a new plan, a new procedure at the same time as I have projects that are kind of wrapping up where I'm thinking about, you know, the writing and the visualization. I think my favorite component is sort of when I first get some data and I'm working through it and visualizing it and sort of figuring out what the data is telling me. I find that part just really exciting. And it's like opening a present or something each time you get a new data set, right?

[00:42:30] Like you've just discovered something about the world, even if it's confusing or it doesn't really make sense. There's something that you now know that you didn't know before. So that kind of can't ever not be exciting. You know, the things that I like, at least, you know, it's hard in the kind of post-talking time because there's always sort of a stress or anxiety about like not knowing what the future holds longer term.

[00:42:54] And so there's always kind of just like that pressure of, OK, am I doing the things I need to be doing to make sure that I have the right next paths and stuff like that? So that can be hard. But, you know, so it goes. Do you feel like you have to be working all the time? Like, are you able to take down time and not feel like guilty about it? Yeah, it varies. I mean, there are times when I when I definitely work more than I maybe should or want to. But I actually think I've I've gotten a pretty good balance of that.

[00:43:23] And I will say that, you know, my current sort of supervisory network of people, there's you know, I have a supervisor at McGill, Sarah Woolley, as well as within this nonprofit. And they are very, very supportive of the idea that I shouldn't work all the time. And so it's usually not external pressure that's causing problems for me. Yeah. Do you ever make mistakes and how do you handle that?

[00:43:49] Is this something that's hard for you to deal with when a mistake is made or have you learned how to deal with it? Yeah, I mean, of course, I make mistakes. If you someone says they don't, it's because they're delusional or they're lying. And so the goal is really to just, yeah, exactly that, to just be aware of and admit to and know that it's fine. It can be hard to do that, of course.

[00:44:11] And so certainly when I'm like, I remember during my PhD, it's kind of one of my first, I did discover that I'd made a mistake in one of those annotations I was doing. And it did change one of these results. And so at first I was just like, oh, no, like it really did freak me out. And I, you know, I brought my supervisor. Luckily, it was just able to be honest. And he was immediately like, you know, no problem. Let's keep moving. You know, like there was no, you can't, you can't shame people for that.

[00:44:37] I mean, you know, you can shame people for sloppy things if it's repeated or whatever, maybe. But they're going to happen. And so it has to be something that we all acknowledge and deal with. Yeah. So would you say then you're not like scared of making mistakes? Or is there anything that kind of like scares you and makes you anxious on a daily basis with your work? Yeah, not too bad. I mean, it's always scary.

[00:45:02] I think it's scary when I think about some, when, you know, when someone reviews my code or something like that, I'm scared because I do value my, you know, ability to be careful and to not make glaring or dumb mistakes, I guess. And so I'm just always, it's always a little underwrecking.

[00:45:19] But I also think people are being more and more open with their code and sort of the idea of people evaluating each other and just sort of checking or not, you know, checking in and making sure that everyone's on the same page more and more often is super valuable and useful. And yeah. Would you say you're sort of an introvert or an extrovert or somewhere in between? And is there one type of person that's better for being a scientist than the other type? I'm definitely more extroverted.

[00:45:45] I don't think that there is a, that either one necessarily is better or worse. But I do think, you know, in particularly in grad school, it was really important that I, the only way that I sort of was able to be successful was because I found a really beautiful community of other grad students and people in similar positions as me that was able to support me through the whole process. Because it can be, it can be very lonely and stressful, I think.

[00:46:13] And to some people, I think, you know, maybe for people who are a little more introverted, that can actually work for them to just find to kind of dig in and, and really dive deep into their research without the sort of external stuff. But for me, that would never have worked. And so I am really grateful that I met, you know, some of my lifelong friends and colleagues during that, the time when I was in grad school, I just had built this really wonderful and supportive community of people. So yeah, that's great.

[00:46:40] My last question, what do you, what's your favorite thing to do for fun? Like, what do you do just to chill out and turn your brain off for a little while? Yeah, great question. I mean, I, I do still really enjoy, you know, those breaks when I go back out and go camping or hiking or those kinds of things. Um, on a more day to day basis, I do enjoy playing some video games and just kind of disconnecting from the world through that is really fun and wonderful. Yeah.

[00:47:09] Is there, are there a lot of places to go hiking and camping in Quebec? Yeah, there are. I mean, and actually, you know, I was a bit nervous when I first moved to Montreal that I would move into a big city and wouldn't be able to find nature. And one, there is a lot of nature here and very accessible. But I also actually, it turns out I love being in a city too. I love the diversity in the community. And so actually, one of the great things to do is just walk down the street. There's, you know, I can walk to anywhere I need to get to really or hop on the metro and get anywhere in the city I need to get to.

[00:47:38] And, and also bike around during the summer. So there's like cafes and breweries and, you know, museums and all sorts of stuff to do and see here. And I love exploring the city and getting to know kind of the people that the people are up to around me. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. All right. Well, I think those are all of my questions. Thank you so much for, for speaking with me. It's, it's fascinating. I'm fascinated by language. And it's, it's so interesting to hear that it can be similar across species. Like that's really amazing. So yeah.

[00:48:08] So thanks. Thanks for speaking with me. I appreciate it. That's it. Thank you. Our theme music is called Discussion and was composed by folk acoustic. Send along any questions to socializingwithscientists at gmail.com. Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. And we'd love it if you could give us a five-star rating or a short little review.

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