Human perception of avian biodiversity in naturalistic auditory scenes
- 1Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, Département d’Études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, CNRS, Paris, France
Abstract
Natural environments are filled with a diverse array of sound sources, from bird vocalizations and insect stridulations to waterfalls and wind noise. The sounds often co-occur, arriving at the ear of human listeners as a mixture of the different sources. The auditory system is tasked with segregating the individual sound sources of the mixture into meaningful representations. In contrast with human auditory perception in urban environments, which include speech and music, little is known about our capacity to segregate mixtures common in natural environments. Here, we report on the capacities of the human auditory system when presented with mixtures of bird vocalizations – that is, scenes common in natural environments – by systematically varying the number of vocalizations from the same species and from different species. We found that humans could discriminate mixtures but only up until around 8 individuals of the same species beyond which mixtures may rely on a time-averaged summary statistic. Furthermore, humans appear to segregate mixtures of different species based on the disparities in their summary statistics. The results suggest that humans analyse natural auditory scenes using the same segregation mechanisms as for sounds produced by humans and other geophysical sounds. Author summary: Walk through the forest and you are immersed in a rich acoustic environment – the singing of birds overhead, the sound of wind through leaves, the chirps of insects in the brush. Making sense of these complex sound environments requires the auditory system to organize multiple simultaneous sounds into meaningful representations. Although the details of this organization have been studied in depth for speech and music sounds, less is known about the auditory processing of nature sounds, such as mixtures of different bird songs. Using a combination of behavioral experiments and computational modeling, we examined the limits of the human auditory processing of naturalistic scenes corresponding to mixtures of bird vocalizations and choruses. Human listeners appear to balance the processing of biodiversity, both in terms of species abundance and richness, using a summary statistic representation for large choruses and segregating species mixtures by the disparities in their bird song sound statistics. These findings offer insights into the auditory capacities of humans in natural environments.
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BibTeX
@article{mcwalter2026human,
title = {{Human perception of avian biodiversity in naturalistic auditory scenes}},
author = {Richard McWalter and Christian Lorenzi},
journal = {PLOS Computational Biology},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014775},
url = {https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014775},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Human perception of avian biodiversity in naturalistic auditory scenes
AU - Richard McWalter
AU - Christian Lorenzi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/21
JO - PLOS Computational Biology
DO - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014775
UR - https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014775
AB - Natural environments are filled with a diverse array of sound sources, from bird vocalizations and insect stridulations to waterfalls and wind noise. The sounds often co-occur, arriving at the ear of human listeners as a mixture of the different sources. The auditory system is tasked with segregating the individual sound sources of the mixture into meaningful representations. In contrast with human auditory perception in urban environments, which include speech and music, little is known about our capacity to segregate mixtures common in natural environments. Here, we report on the capacities of the human auditory system when presented with mixtures of bird vocalizations – that is, scenes common in natural environments – by systematically varying the number of vocalizations from the same species and from different species. We found that humans could discriminate mixtures but only up until around 8 individuals of the same species beyond which mixtures may rely on a time-averaged summary statistic. Furthermore, humans appear to segregate mixtures of different species based on the disparities in their summary statistics. The results suggest that humans analyse natural auditory scenes using the same segregation mechanisms as for sounds produced by humans and other geophysical sounds. Author summary: Walk through the forest and you are immersed in a rich acoustic environment – the singing of birds overhead, the sound of wind through leaves, the chirps of insects in the brush. Making sense of these complex sound environments requires the auditory system to organize multiple simultaneous sounds into meaningful representations. Although the details of this organization have been studied in depth for speech and music sounds, less is known about the auditory processing of nature sounds, such as mixtures of different bird songs. Using a combination of behavioral experiments and computational modeling, we examined the limits of the human auditory processing of naturalistic scenes corresponding to mixtures of bird vocalizations and choruses. Human listeners appear to balance the processing of biodiversity, both in terms of species abundance and richness, using a summary statistic representation for large choruses and segregating species mixtures by the disparities in their bird song sound statistics. These findings offer insights into the auditory capacities of humans in natural environments.
SN - 1553-7358
SN - 1553-734X
ER -