Vocal repertoires differ in sound types and timing patterns

Structure Across Voices: Comparing acoustic-event type accumulation and sequence dependence across four vocal repertoires using frozen audio encoders

SoundArtificial Intelligence

Summary

Different animals and humans produce sounds organized in distinct ways, but comparing these vocal patterns is hard because they use different sound types and sequence lengths. The authors used the same audio analysis method on four species—sperm whales, humans, Bengalese finches, and marmosets—to fairly compare their vocal sounds and sequences. They found that whales produce new sound types fastest, finches have strong short-term order patterns, and extending the context changes how these differences appear. This shows that vocal differences depend on which sound features and timing aspects you look at.

What this means in practice

  • For wildlife bioacoustics teams: Identify and compare animal vocal repertoires more consistently by analyzing different species with a unified audio encoding method.
  • For speech technology developers: Improve models of speech sound organization by integrating insights about sound type accumulation and sequence patterns from diverse vocal repertoires.

Authors

Mudit Sinha, Sanika Chavan

Abstract

Vocal repertoires can differ in acoustic-event type accumulation and temporal organization, yet direct comparison is difficult because corpora use different native events and unequal amounts of sequence. We compare sperm whale codas, human speech phones, Bengalese finch syllables, and common marmoset calls using the same frozen-audio-encoder procedure while matching event count and local sequence opportunity. Whale shows the fastest type accumulation; Finch shows the strongest immediate dependence and repeated-subsequence recurrence. Physically interpretable acoustics recover complementary parts of this profile, continuous analyses without clustering support broad Whale acoustic coverage, and source- and position-preserving nulls retain both Finch order effects. Extending predictive context shifts the comparison toward Whale. Thus repertoire differences depend on the acoustic property and temporal scale measured rather than forming a single hierarchy.
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