Humans have long assumed that complex language belongs to us alone. But other animals have been communicating all along in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and linguistics are now making it possible to detect increasingly complex patterns in animal behaviours and vocalizations. For the first time, we face the possibility of genuine translation between human and non-human language.
What would it mean to translate across species? If we can begin to understand what other animals are saying, new questions and obligations follow. How do they make sense of one another? How do they express their interests and needs? And how can we learn to listen more closely? Language, and the ability to translate between languages, has always been at the foundation of diplomacy — the means by which different parties express their interests, negotiate their differences, and find a basis for coexistence. Could interspecies translation become the basis for a new kind of diplomacy, one that represents the more-than-human?
This event brings together researchers working at the intersection of biology, cognition, and technology to explore the frontiers of animal communication. The evening will begin with a participatory, immersive sound workshop, Deep Listening for Nonhuman Perspective-Taking, led by Mason Youngblood, a behavioral scientist and sound artist at Stony Brook University. Afterwards, Youngblood will moderate conversation with Simon Townsend (University of Zurich) and Martin Surbeck (Harvard) who collaborated on a recent study illuminating the complex syntax of bonobo vocalizations; as well as Ciara Sypherd (Harvard) whose work applies machine learning to decode animal signals.
Program
- 6:00pm – Doors open
- 6:30pm – Opening remarks
- 6:35pm – Sound Workshop: Deep Listening for Nonhuman Perspective-Taking
- 6:45pm – Discussion and Q&A
- 7:45pm – Reception
- 8:30pm – End
iCal / Outlook
Event start time
-
Boston
6:00PM
Moderator
-
![]()
Bio
Mason Youngblood
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute for Advanced Computational Science,
Stony Brook UniversityMason Youngblood is a behavioral scientist and sound artist at Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science, where he investigates the cultural evolution of communication, cognition, and creativity in both human and non-human animals. His recent research—published in journals like Science and featured by National Geographic and Scientific American—uses computational modeling to reveal the structural complexity and cultural richness of bird and whale songs. Drawing on over a decade of experience in electronic music production and DJing, Youngblood merges generative composition with scientific data to create immersive audio installations. His current work reconstructs the lost voices of endangered and extinct species, inviting audiences to inhabit non-human perspectives and experience the disappearing cultural traditions of the more-than-human world.
Panelists
-
![]()
Bio
Simon Townsend
Professor,
Department of Evolutionary Anthropology
University of ZurichSimon Townsend received his bachelors in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford in 2005. He then moved to Scotland to conduct his PhD with Swiss primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler in the School of Psychology at the University of St Andrews, where he focused on the vocal communication skills of wild chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest, Uganda. In 2008, Townsend took up a post-doc position with Marta Manser at the University of Zurich (UZH) to work on meerkat vocal communication and cognition at the Kalahari Meerkat Project in South Africa.
In 2015, he returned to the UK as an Assistant Professor in Language and Learning in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, in 2017, he accepted a Swiss National Science Foundation-funded Research Professorship in the Department of Comparative Linguistics at UZH. Most recently, Townsend moved to the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at UZH, where he remains an Associate Professor leading his group investigating the evolutionary origins of human language.
-
![]()
Bio
Martin Surbeck
Associate Professor,
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard UniversityMartin Surbeck focuses his research primarily on questions related to aspects of competition and cooperation both within and between groups. He makes use of our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, as referential models to infer potential selective pressures and existing predispositions in our evolutionary past. Of particular interest to Surbeck is the fascinating social system of bonobos and the question of what selection pressures were responsible for differentiating this species from the better-known chimpanzees. In his research lab, he often uses a comparative approach and mainly works with data from wild populations to get an integral understanding of a wide range of social traits.
In the beginning of 2016, Surbeck established a new bonobo research site at Kokolopori in collaboration with the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI) and Vie Sauvage. Through insights from this new site, he anticipates contributing to a better understanding of behavioral diversity within bonobos. Currently, he and his team follow three habituated neighboring bonobo groups daily, aiming to gain new insights into the mechanisms of intergroup tolerance by combining behavioral and endocrinological data.
-
![]()
Bio
Ciara Sypherd
PhD Candidate, Bioengineering
Harvard UniversityOver the past decade, Ciara has explored the intricate world of animal communication and cognition using machine learning to uncover patterns and meaning in animal signals. From scrutinizing ant trails and classifying pig grunts to collecting whale clicks, decoding wolf howls, and deciphering chimp hoots, Ciara’s work spans species, developing computational tools to study how animals exchange information. Bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to these questions, Ciara earned a B.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering and a B.S. in Astrobiology and Biogeosciences from Arizona State University. Now a Ph.D. candidate in Bioengineering at Harvard University, they continue developing machine learning methods to analyze animal vocalizations. Ultimately, their research aims to deepen our understanding of how other species think, communicate, and interact with one another.
Planetary Embassy
This event is part of the Planetary Embassy in Boston, a series of activities dedicated to international, interdisciplinary, and interspecies collaboration. The Planetary Embassy explores how we can work with the more-than-human world to address urgent and interconnected planetary crises through conversations, installations, film screenings, and more, with contributions from Switzerland, Boston, and beyond.