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March 19, 2026<\/p>\n
3 min read<\/p>\n
Add Us On Google<\/span>Add SciAm<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n What animal are you? Humans and animals tend to like the same mating calls<\/p>\n Whether it\u2019s a canary\u2019s chirp or a treefrog\u2019s croak, humans tend to prefer many of the same sounds that animals do themselves, a new study finds<\/p>\n By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron<\/span><\/p>\n A male hourglass tree frog (Dendropsophus ebraccatus) with an inflated vocal sac used to produce calls.<\/p>\n 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\u2014although it\u2019s unclear why.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cliked more.\u201d On average, humans tended to prefer the same mating calls that animals themselves did. (You can try it for yourself here.)<\/p>\n \u201cI was pretty shocked to be honest,\u201d says lead study author Logan James, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. \u201cWe designed this, we were excited about it, and we had reasons to believe that it could be true,\u201d he adds. But \u201cI really didn\u2019t know if it was going to pan out.\u201d<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n James and his colleagues compared the participants\u2019 selections to animals\u2019 \u201cpreference,\u201d which was gauged by their recorded interest or response to the sounds in previous studies.<\/p>\n \u201cOverall, 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,\u201d James says. \u201cThat alone was really quite striking to us.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, humans seemed more likely to prefer the animals\u2019 pick when the creatures\u2019 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\u2019t any more accurate at selecting the calls animals found more \u201cattractive\u201d than nonexpert humans.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t always hold the same appeal for humans as they did for members of the species themselves. Interestingly, the more \u201cacoustic adornments\u201d\u2014added chirps, clicks, chucks, and more\u2014that a call had, the more it was preferred, James says.<\/p>\n The study is \u201cwell conducted,\u201d says David Reby, a professor of ethology at Jean Monnet University in France. \u201cI wish I’d been part of the team doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The answer could lie in the way both humans and other animals process sound. \u201cWe all have to do the same thing,\u201d James explains. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n It also raises the question of how humans process \u201cbeauty\u201d in nature, from birdsong to floral scents to the color of butterflies.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are signals that were designed to be attractive but never designed to attract humans specifically,\u201d James says. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. Scientific American<\/span> has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a Scientific American<\/span> subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm <\/span>always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" March 19, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm What animal are you? Humans and animals tend to like the same mating calls Whether it\u2019s a canary\u2019s chirp or a treefrog\u2019s croak, humans tend to prefer many of the same sounds that animals do themselves, a new study finds By Jackie Flynn Mogensen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[3846,3699,680,3698,14088,10871],"class_list":{"0":"post-47165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-animal","9":"tag-animals","10":"tag-calls","11":"tag-humans","12":"tag-mating","13":"tag-tend"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
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