Some Samoyed dogs howl along to music
Photograph by Adri / Alamy
Scroll through #SingingDog hashtags on social media and you’ll find plenty of clips of dogs howling along to their favorite tunes. But can a dog Callas show any real musicality?
That’s the question that psychologist Aniruddh Patel of Tufts University in Massachusetts and his colleagues have attempted to answer with a striking new study, showing that some doggy divas do indeed perceive pitch and adjust their vocals accordingly.
The researchers were inspired by descriptions of howling wolves in packs. “Howling has some similarities to human singing, in that this is a long, sustained vocalization,” says Patel. Observations from nature suggest that each individual wolf tries to hit a different note. The result is a discordant chorus that can create the illusion of a much larger group, which will help scare off potential predators. “And so it had been theorized by some wolf biologists that they were actually paying attention and changing the pitch,” he says.
Of course, this is very difficult to test experimentally, which is why Patel and his colleagues turned to domestic animals. They asked a handful of dog owners to record their dogs’ harmonies to their personally preferred tracks—first in the original key, then in versions that had been transposed three semitones above and three semitones below—to see how they would react to the change in pitch.
The researchers focused their analysis on two ancient breeds – Samoyeds and Shiba Inus – which are thought to be more closely related to the wolf’s ancestors than modern varieties. To increase the statistical reliability of the analysis, each dog had to produce at least 30 howls, lasting at least 1 second each, for each of the transposed versions.
All four Samoyeds studied showed some sensitivity to the pitch of the track, consistently adapting their vocalizations to the new key, although in some cases they did not exactly match it.
“They’re trying to have a relationship with what they’re hearing in their own voice; they’re not just being triggered to unleash an instinctive and inflexible response,” says Patel. You can watch Luna, one of the contestants, perform Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s song “Shallow” here:
The two shiba inus, on the other hand, appeared to be tone deaf. “It’s possible there’s some genetic variation within ancient breeds that makes some more predisposed to howl,” Patel hypothesizes—though he admits he might have found more musicality in a larger sample.
The findings may provide some insight into the origins of human music. Some theorists have argued that singing evolved from the fine motor control accompanying speech, which allows us to imitate complex sounds, but the fact that dogs can also control pitch without any other form of vocal learning suggests that language would not have been a necessary precursor. “It is possible that our ability and desire to coordinate pitch with others when we sing has very ancient evolutionary roots, and may not simply be a byproduct of our ability to imitate complex sounds,” says Patel.
Exactly why dogs feel the need to join is another question. “From the videos we saw, it seems like the dogs are actually quite engaged with the music,” he says. They were not only looking at their owner for a reward, but were staring intently into the distance. “So I think (the music) is kind of a surrogate howl-like signal to them, and gets them in this social mode to want to join in.”
Buddhamas Pralle Kriengwatana at KU Leuven in Belgium, who recently co-authored a review paper examining the evidence for musical appreciation in non-human animals, is intrigued by the findings, although she would like to see more diverse samples. “It would have been nice for them to have a comparison of ancient versus modern breeds,” she says.
As for the dogs’ somewhat discordant efforts, she suggests that there could be many reasons why the sounds don’t match. “Who knows, maybe they want their voices to be heard and hear themselves sing,” she says.
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