Phylogenetic signal in marine mammal and bird vocalizations captured by audio foundation models: the limited benefit of domain-specific pretraining

This study asks whether general-purpose audio embeddings implicitly encode evolutionary relationships never explicitly trained into them. Testing four pretrained audio models on marine mammal and bird vocalizations, the authors found strong correlations between embedding-space distances and phylogenetic distance, particularly among cetaceans, robust even after controlling for frequency and dimensionality. Surprisingly, domain-specific bioacoustic models didn't outperform general-purpose ones on birds. Applications include bioacoustic monitoring, biodiversity and conservation research, taxonomic classification of species from sound, and broader insight into what unsupervised audio representations capture, informing model selection for ecological and evolutionary biology research. Authors: Víctor Rincón Yepes Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22458v1