What animal are you? Humans and animals tend to like the same mating calls

What animal are you? Humans and animals tend to like the same mating calls

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

Your musical taste may feel unique, but there may be something more biologically innate driving your acoustic choices: A new study found that animals and humans tend to prefer many of the same mating calls. The results indicate that humans may be more attuned to animal sounds than scientists once thought – although it is unclear why.

The natural world is a cacophony of squawks, screams, hisses, chirps, whines, grunts, growls and more. And while humans can often distinguish distress calls from animals or distinguish dog barks, many animal sounds can seem inconsequential to the untrained human ear. But new research in more than 4,000 people suggests otherwise. Participants were asked to listen to dozens of pairs of calls from 16 animal species, including mammals, birds, frogs and insects, and were then asked to choose which call they “liked more.” On average, humans tended to prefer the same mating calls as the animals themselves. (You can try it yourself here.)

“I was pretty shocked to be honest,” says lead study author Logan James, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. “We designed this, we were excited about it, and we had reason to believe it might be true,” he adds. But “I really didn’t know if it was going to pan out.”

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James and his colleagues compared the participants’ choices with animals’ “preferences,” which were measured by their registered interest or response to the sounds in previous studies.

“Overall, we found that people were indeed more likely than chance to choose the same sound that the animals tended to prefer in previous research,” says James. “That alone was really quite striking to us.”

Also, humans seemed more likely to prefer the animals’ choices when the creatures’ preference responses were strongest, suggesting that sound preferences can be shared across species, says James. Musicians or people more familiar with animal sounds, such as birders, for example, were no more accurate in choosing the calls animals found more “attractive” than non-experts.

The trend was also consistent across species. Whether it was frogs or birds or mammals or insects, humans tended to prefer the mating calls that the animals preferred more than if the choices were left to chance.

There were some notable additions: sounds from Song Sparrows and a cricket found in Hawaii had a high degree of correspondence between these respective animals and humans. In contrast, the calls of the galada, a monkey found in Ethiopia, did not always have the same appeal to humans as they did to members of the species itself. Interestingly, the more “acoustic embellishments” — added chirps, clicks, chucks and more — that a call had, the more it was preferred, James says.

The study is “well done,” says David Reby, professor of ethology at Jean Monnet University in France. “I wish I had been part of the team that did that.”

A major unanswered question, however, is quite simply: Why is this so? Animals may be attracted to a mating call for a myriad of reasons, such as because it makes one potential mate sound larger or stronger than another. Humans probably don’t make the same kind of judgments, notes Reby.

“It requires so much more investigation to understand what’s really going on in the minds of the animals and in the minds of the people making these assessments,” he says.

The answer may lie in the way both humans and other animals process sound. “We all have to do the same thing,” explains James. “There are vibrations in the air. Animals have to detect that and then encode information from that to make decisions about what to do.”

It also raises the question of how humans process “beauty” in nature, from the song of birds to the scents of flowers to the color of butterflies.

“These are cues that were designed to be attractive, but never designed to attract people specifically,” says James. “It’s cool to think that maybe because we share some of our basic sensory processing with the other animals, we can also enjoy that beauty.”

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