Socializing with Scientists

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

Season 2 Episode 16

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 49:18

Logan grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, bears ambling through his Colorado backyard and summers full of prairie dog census volunteer work. But it wasn't until an Introduction to Linguistics class during his first semester at McGill University that he realized he wanted to pursue a degree in biology and language. With his formative years spent exploring nature, research in animal communication inevitably followed.

Logan James is now a postdoctoral fellow at McGill, in partnership with the Earth Species Project, where he studies the sounds that animals make and what those sounds mean to other animals. His latest research investigates whether humans prefer the same utterances as the animals themselves, from cricket trills, to songbird warblers and primate grunts.

If you'd like to play an online game to determine whether you prefer the same sounds as a frog, bird, mammal or insect, click here: https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc

Sparrow sounds provided by Stephen Nowicki and Susan Peters.

Túngara frog sounds provided by Michael Ryan.