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

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

Your taste in music 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’s unclear why.

The natural world is a cacophony of squawks, screeches, coos, chirps, whinnies, grunts, growls, and more. And while humans can often discern animal distress calls or differentiate dog barks, many animal noises may 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 mating calls from 16 animal species, including mammals, birds, frogs and insects, and then were asked to select which call they “liked more.” On average, humans tended to prefer the same mating calls that animals themselves did. (You can try it for 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 reasons to believe that it could 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’ selections to animals’ “preference,” which was gauged by their recorded interest or response to the sounds in previous studies.

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

What’s more, humans seemed more likely to prefer the animals’ pick when the creatures’ preference responses were strongest, suggesting that sound preferences may be shared across species, James says. Musicians or people who were more familiar with animal sounds, such as birders, for example, weren’t any more accurate at selecting the calls animals found more “attractive” than nonexpert humans.

The trend was consistent across species, too. 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 selections were left up to chance.

There were some notable outliers: noises from Song Sparrows and a Pacific field cricket had some high rates of agreement between these respective animals and humans. By contrast, the calls of the gelada, a monkey found in Ethiopia, didn’t always hold the same appeal for humans as they did for members of the species themselves. Interestingly, the more “acoustic adornments”—added chirps, clicks, chucks, and more—that a call had, the more it was preferred, James says.

The study is “well conducted,” says David Reby, a professor of ethology at Jean Monnet University in France. “I wish I’d been part of the team doing that.”

A major unanswered question, however, is simply: Why is this the case? Animals can be drawn to a mating call for myriad reasons, such as because it makes a potential mate sound bigger or stronger than another. Humans are likely not making the same kind of judgment, Reby notes.

“It calls for so much more investigation to understand what is really going on in the minds of the animals and in the minds of the people that are doing these ratings,” he says.

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

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

“These are signals that were designed to be attractive but never designed to attract humans specifically,” James says. “It’s cool to think that maybe because we share some of our basic sensory processing with those other animals, we get to enjoy in that beauty as well.”

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