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What Do Bats REALLY Sound Like?

Benn Jordan | October 17, 2025



One man’s pest control nightmare is another man’s dive into bioacoustics.
– Support/socials/music: https://linktr.ee/BennJordan
– Special thanks to Wildlife Acoustics for working with a knucklehead like me and making this type of stuff affordable: https://www.wildlifeacoustics.com/

A time-dilated ultrasonic bat recording, of course: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KR_tnUsD0_RFZwExs1K-oFC3S6yG-Rad/view?usp=sharing

Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
1:00 – Bat facts
1:55 – How sonar works
5:22 – Ultrasonic recording
7:33 – BATS AND DEBUSSY
8:50 – Ways to translate ultrasonic recordings
10:40 – Bioacoustic software
13:00 – Audio forensic analysis
17:26 – Crunching audio data with Kaleidoscope
19:39 – Identifying species
20:29 – Outro

Written by Benn Jordan

Comments

This post currently has 44 comments.

  2. @andy_rb

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Some of you may be familiar with birdNET-pi, the AI bird call identifier that runs on a raspberry pi. There's a version now that also detects bats. It identifies birds during the day and bats at night and gives you the results in various ways. Amazing project and easy to implement.

  3. @andy_rb

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Many species of bats live in large colonies with hundreds of thousands of other bats. What blows my mind is the fact that they can fly together and somehow discern the echo of their own chirps amidst calls from all those other bats. How do those tiny brains manage that?

  6. @ventusluca

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Bats are seemingly attracted to my dry herb vaporizer. Twice have I had a bat fly into my face while using it. 😭

    It generates a saw-like buzzing – crackling noise while in use, was wondering if that's messing with their sonar or something like that.

    Either way I turn the device off when I see a bat now lol

  8. @Nonononono_Ohno

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Distance calculations are certainly not what a bat feels it is doing. I'm absolutely convinced that a bat perceives its surroundings with its ears like we perceive our surroundings with our eyes. The constant screams work like a flashlight strobe works for us. Due to the Doppler effect, objects that move towards the bat have a different color than objects that move away from it. Like we can look into a specific direction, a bat can do the same by turning and focusing its ears.

  11. @jvrcreativedesigner2680

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Ever since I learned about critical flicker fusion frequency I always wondered how it compares/differs among humans. I mean, surely not every human has the exact same CFFF. Do F1 pilots have higher CFFF because they trained their reflexes? What about gamers that seem ridiculously good at the game? How does (lack of) sleep or being highly focused affect this phenomenon?

  14. @rcadeu

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    8:00 Forward this piece of music composition sounds like a very nice appropriation of Debussy's "Clair de Lune". Nicely done! Please don't get me wrong. It's a fact that legendary great composers did borrowed of others adding their own subjectiveness to the borrowed material and even J.S. Bach (BWV 1083) has stolen Pergolesi's entire"Stabat Matter" and transformed it a little bit into a "Psalm 51". Mr. Jordan you have a lot of knowledge in order to compose such a beautiful piece! Maybe, one day, you would talk about how much knowledge within music composition Techniques, acoustics, psicoacoustics, and alongside that knowledge of economics, business administration, sociology, psicology and communication you studied or acquired in order to be a musician. Hi from Brazil!

  16. @uhbi8548

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Bat Fact: roughly 1/5 of all mammal species are bats. They are an insanely successful evolutionary model that has settled almost everywhere on earth.

  20. @AngDavies

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    One thing i found interesting is when you said that the echo disappeared, it didnt completely, only the higher freqiency content, which would seem to make sense based on the higher directionality of higher pitches, so the bat might get some idea of direction based on how it sounds? Calls are projected forwards, so lower sounding echoes come from behind?

  23. @sarahlawson4608

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    So I live in Illinois(Champaign Urbana area) and the same 4 bats come out every night at same times. They know my voice and dance in the sky for me. When I start talking to them to say hello they will chirp loudly which you can hear. Then when they go to their trees to hunt locusts and cicadas, I will say “hello battys” and I will hear loud clicks.

  24. @JANEEDISTURBED

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    I came about this channel trying to figure out a sound we have been heating out in our woods up in SE Ohio Valley. It sounds like something making a low to high-pitched yell/screech with each breath. Because you can hear the exhale of its breath at the end of the higher pitch. Starts off low and goes to a higher pitch and quickly halts at the end. We've only been heating it at night though. Usually close to deep dusk this summer. But started last month in June. We really wanna know because whatever it is, it will sound on one side of the woods and then be immediately on the other side within seconds. And it moves so quickly though. To be honest it sounds like either a mating call or a distress call. My son thought maybe it was some sort of bird. But there's no birds that make that sound. Especially at night. They'd be drawing attention to themselves and a predator would definitely end their loud nonsense.

  25. @JANEEDISTURBED

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    8:05
    I've heard these sounds every night this summer. I thought they were birds! And I asked myself (after my husband who is native to this rural area), "What kind of birds do you guys know of that do this at night? Sounds like some kind of songbirds! Crazy!", My son thought this odd low to high pitch scream was some kind of bird. I now believe it's a bat. Or a Coyote of some kind. Not sure yet. But seems logical in these northern parts of the Appalachians of SE Ohio Valley. But my husband who has lived here all his life says he's never heard a sound like that. If it's not a bat then what is it?

  26. @senorton

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    great job with this material, benn! and fun fact, the bioacousticians call that crazy sound of the bat homing in on a prey item a "feeding buzz" 🙂

  28. @Cheezitnator

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Bats are good to have. They eat millions of flying insects every night. If you want them to move out of the attic you should get some bat houses and put them up either on the sunny side of the house or a tall pole. I got batbnb myself.

  29. @atomsofstardust

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Benn, I’ve been on an absolute binge-watch of your videos in the past two days, and I just want to thank you for making these incredible videos!
    I’ve found your channel some time ago from like a Spotify video I think, and I gotta say your mini-documentaries are amazing (can’t find any other word because it really feels like a documentary)!
    Be it on AI and predicting G violence, or recording sounds of remote areas and getting lost at sea, or shady Spotify, or even Behringer drama — they are all incredible!
    Please, never stop making amazing films like that, they are true works of art in and of itself!

  39. @j.m.b.7449

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Daaamn son pro audio world needs dark mode bad, burning my retina's here
    Mindblowing and amazing material though! Thanks for bringing me these video's!

  41. @AnalogMonoxide

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Well, now there's ANOTHER kind of microphone I wasn't aware of that I want to play with.
    This actually seems far more interesting than either hydrophones or geophones to me, which are both on my list of "that would be cool, but not so cool as to make me want to pay for one".
    It's not really that often I saw orcas in the fjords here, I don't have a boat, and… ok, I may have digressed.
    Thanks for the bat facts – I must do some research on ultrasonic microphones now.

  42. @AnalogMonoxide

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Haha, I'm catching myself sitting here with my nose almost pressed against the screen when looking at the chirps in spectrum analysis.
    My experience with bats has mostly been trying to avoid hooking them when fly fishing. They were always a little too interested and I was sometimes worried I'd end up fishing a bat.

  43. @IRuinEvrything

    October 17, 2025 at 7:39 am

    Dude, I've been a sub for a while, and I periodically use some free time to work my way back through your older vids that I either missed or you made before I was aware of you.
    I have no idea why you don't have 10 times the subs. Your vid quality is ridiculously high, your notions are better organized than they have to be… I mean, you clearly do good work because you can't stand putting out bad work.
    I will continue to evangelize. I have learned so much from your segments.

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