🎶 We share acoustic preferences with certain animals

A study conducted by a team from McGill University revealed that humans and certain animal species share acoustic preferences, at least when it comes to animal sounds. The findings provide experimental evidence suggesting that aesthetic judgments related to sounds may be influenced by common sensory mechanisms.

"Charles Darwin believed that birds and humans shared the same 'taste for the beautiful' regarding color. However, to this day, no study has exhaustively compared the aesthetic preferences of humans to those of animals," explains Logan James, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in biology at McGill University. "We extended this notion to sounds."


"Our findings indicate that humans and certain animals likely share perceptual and cognitive mechanisms necessary for processing sounds. This research could also help understand why human beings love music so much. If our sense of beauty is rooted in ancient common biology, the characteristics that make a song moving to us might be related to those that made animal calls attractive long before we existed."

This study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, Yale University, the University of Auckland, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Online games for the benefit of science

The research team used 110 pairs of animal calls whose appeal to members of the same species had already been measured in previous studies. They then had human participants listen to the recordings and indicate which pair they preferred. The preferences of animals and humans overlapped mainly for sounds containing acoustic ornaments—additional elements that animals sometimes incorporate, such as clucks, clicks, and trills.

The more a sound was liked by animals, the more likely it was to be selected by humans.

"Much of the beauty we find in nature—the scent of flowers, the colors of butterflies, and the songs of birds—did not evolve for us, yet we find these signals captivating," says Sarah Woolley, co-author of the study and an associate professor of biology at McGill University.

Over 4,000 participants took part in this study, which was conducted in the form of an online game.

Samuel Mehr, senior author of the study, notes that this format allowed the team to collect data from a wide range of participants and test whether demographic factors could predict preferences. They found that musical training or experience in identifying animal calls did not have much influence, but that music lovers were more likely to share the same preferences as the animals. Samuel Mehr is affiliated with Yale and the University of Auckland.

The researchers continue to collect data using the online game. They will investigate whether sounds have the same appeal when manipulated, such as by adding clicks or trills. They also plan to assess whether the results replicate in other species.