Humans and Animals Prefer the Same Sounds, a 4,000-Person Study Confirms

AAAS / Science

Charles Darwin proposed it over 150 years ago: different species might share what he called a "taste for the beautiful." A birdsong that attracts a mate might also please a human ear, not because we learned to appreciate it, but because the underlying sensory machinery is similar enough to produce overlapping preferences. It was a bold idea, and it went largely untested until now.

4,196 listeners, 16 species, one question

Logan James and colleagues designed a global citizen-science experiment to find out whether Darwin was right. They recruited 4,196 participants and presented each one with 110 pairs of animal sounds drawn from 16 different species spanning insects, frogs, birds, and mammals. In each pair, previous behavioral studies had already established which sound the animals themselves preferred, typically for mate choice.

The task was simple: listen to both sounds and pick the one you like better. No context was given about which sound animals preferred. The researchers then compared human choices against the established animal preferences.

A modest but consistent alignment

Across the full dataset, humans were more likely than chance to pick the same sound that animals favored. The effect was not overwhelming, but it was consistent and statistically robust. When animals showed stronger preferences for one sound over another, humans were more likely to agree. Participants also tended to choose animal-preferred sounds more quickly and to select them again on repeated trials, suggesting these were not random or uncertain judgments.

The agreement held across a strikingly diverse range of species. Humans aligned with the preferences of crickets, tree frogs, songbirds, and other mammals. Whatever sensory feature makes certain sounds more attractive, it appears to transcend vast evolutionary distances.

Not about pitch alone, but pitch matters

The researchers investigated whether any single acoustic property, such as pitch, loudness, or duration, could explain the overlap. The answer was mostly no. The preferences appear to reflect complex combinations of cues rather than any single dimension of sound.

But there was one notable exception. Humans showed a consistent tendency to prefer lower-pitched sounds. This bias did not always align with animal preferences and may reflect something specific to human auditory processing rather than a shared cross-species trait.

Musical training did not help, but listening habits did

One might expect that people with musical training or expertise in animal sounds would be better at detecting whatever qualities animals find attractive. They were not. Neither musical training nor familiarity with animal calls increased agreement with animal preferences.

There was, however, a subtle effect of daily music listening. Individuals who reported spending more time listening to music showed slightly greater alignment with animal preferences. The researchers suggest this could reflect enhanced auditory attention and discrimination rather than any learned aesthetic framework. People who spend more time actively listening may simply be better at detecting acoustic qualities that matter.

What this does and does not tell us

The findings support the idea that basic sensory architecture, shared across a wide range of species, creates some overlap in what sounds are perceived as attractive. This is consistent with Darwin's hypothesis, though the mechanism is not yet clear. It could be that certain acoustic features are inherently easier to process, or that they signal qualities like health or vigor that are universally relevant.

The study does not claim that humans and animals hear the world the same way. The overlap is partial. Humans have their own biases, like the preference for low pitch, and animals make choices in contexts, such as territorial defense or mate assessment, that are absent from a citizen-science listening task on a computer screen.

The experimental design also has inherent constraints. Participants listened to recorded sounds stripped of their natural context, timing, and spatial cues. In the wild, animals respond to sounds embedded in a rich environment of competing signals. How much of the preference overlap would survive in a natural setting is an open question.

Still, the core finding is hard to dismiss. Across thousands of judgments, spanning creatures as different as crickets and primates, something about the way nervous systems process sound produces convergent aesthetic preferences. Darwin had a hunch. The data now back it up, at least modestly.