Humans and animals share preferences for sounds, citizen-science study shows
Do humans share a sense of acoustic beauty with other animals? According to a new study, the answer may be yes. In a global citizen-science experiment, researchers show that humans tend to prefer many of the same animal sounds that animals themselves favor – findings that offer support for Charles Darwin’s longstanding idea that different species can share a “taste for the beautiful.” Across the animal kingdom, animals produce sounds to communicate and attract mates. Although mating calls and songs vary within a species, those listening for them often favor certain variations over others. These preferences can arise from inherent sensory biases, evolutionary pressures, or a combination of both. Because the basic organization of sensory systems is widely shared across species, the sounds designed to attract conspecifics, such as a pleasant birdsong, may also appeal to other species, including humans – a theory that Charles Darwin called “a taste for the beautiful.” However, the idea that humans share similar aesthetic preferences for sounds with other animals has not been rigorously tested.
Logan James and colleagues conducted a global citizen-science experiment in which 4,196 human participants evaluated 110 pairs of animal sounds recorded from 16 species. In each pair, previous studies had already established which sound animals themselves preferred. Participants chose which of the two paired sounds they liked more, allowing the authors to compare human acoustic preferences with animals’. James et al. found that humans share certain acoustic preferences with a wide range of animals, including insects, frogs, birds, and other mammals. Overall, humans were more likely than chance to prefer the same sounds that animals themselves favor, and this agreement strengthened when animals showed clearer preferences. Moreover, humans tended to choose animal-preferred sounds more quickly and repeatedly. Together, these findings suggest a modest but consistent overlap between human aesthetic judgments and the signals animals use in mate choice. According to the authors, preferences likely reflect complex combinations of cues rather than any single property such as pitch, loudness, or duration. However, humans showed one notable tendency – they favored lower-pitched sounds. The findings also suggest neither expertise with animal sounds nor musical training increased agreement with animals’ preferences, though individuals who reported listening to more music daily showed slightly greater alignment, possibly due to enhanced auditory attention and discrimination.
