You and a frog might have the same taste in music

Ah, spring. The flowers are in bloom. The air is full of tree sperm I'm allergic to. And the birds and bugs and frogs are screeching at the tops of their little lungs: "I'm sexy! I'm sexy! Pick me! Pick me!"

It truly is the most beautiful time of the year.

Jokes aside, spring is undeniably beautiful. It is a loud, colorful, fragrant feast for the senses. We humans find spring so beautiful that we emulate its blossoms and birdsong in our own art, fashion, music, and even perfumes. But we rarely think about whether other animals might appreciate this beauty, too — even though floral fragrance attracts pollinators and birdsong is quite literally a sexy serenade.

As is so often the case, science is revealing that humans are less special than we might like to think. New research published last week in Science showed that humans and animals tend to agree on what sounds good — at least when it comes to the sounds animals use to attract each other.

What's new

The main finding is that humans, when played two animal sounds and asked to pick the one they like best, tend to pick the sound preferred by animals. This trend was stronger and humans also were faster to make a choice for sounds that animals preferred more strongly.^[1]

To quote the paper: "Our human participants agreed with the frogs."

Humans and animals both preferred fancy sounds with "adornments" like trills. But no single acoustic factor could consistently predict the preferences of humans or animals (and other animals did not share our preference for low-pitched sounds).^[2] Instead, taste seems to involve an interplay of multiple factors.

There was also an interesting null result. The researchers expected that humans with experience identifying animal sounds (like birders) or making music would have different preferences. This turned out to be false. Instead, a different group stood out: voracious music listeners.^[3] People who reported spending more time listening to music than average were slightly more likely to agree with animals about what sounds good than everyone else.^[4]

Who did it

The lead author Logan James is a postdoc at McGill University in Montreal focused on acoustic perception across species. Co-authors Sarah Woolley and Jon Sakata, also at McGill, both lead labs focused on singing in zebra finches (the cutest "lab rat" animal, yes I will die on this hill). The other three co-authors are Michael Ryan, who studies animal sexual selection behaviors, and cognitive scientists Courtney Hilton and Samuel Mehr, who study music in the mind.

The actual data came from tens of thousands of citizen scientists who participated through a gamified experiment called Calls of the Wild — which you can still play, yourself!

You can read Mehr's breakdown of the study over at Bluesky:

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

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— samuel mehr (@mehr.nz) March 19, 2026 at 7:12 PM

How they did it

The basic design of the study was simple: thousands of human participants were played two animal sounds and asked which they liked better. Each pair of sounds were mating calls from the same species of mammal, insect, amphibian, or bird. And importantly, the scientists knew which of the two sounds the animals "prefer" — as in which of the sounds more often wins over potential mates. The researchers then compared human and animal preferences and ran analyses comparing specific groups of humans (like musicians) to other groups.

The researchers also ran several more specific experiments, including comparing human and animal preferences for artificially manipulated animal sounds (for instance: humans and frogs preferred sounds with lower pitch).

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Why it matters

To me, this study implicitly asks a provocative question: Might animals experience beauty like we do? Or, flipped around: is our sense of what's beautiful more animal than we might like to think?

(Aside: as I sit here in Vienna, I cannot resist imagining Sigmund Freud's ghost hovering over my shoulder and nodding along as I read this paper. Sublimating your unfulfilled libido into writing symphonies sounds less wacky if you think human aesthetics is an evolutionary elaboration on animal mating calls.)

I personally don't find it surprising that humans and animals prefer similar sounds. Humans didn't pop up out of nowhere. We evolved. And evolution works with what it's got. Lungs are repurposed guts. Is it so wild to think that human music was cobbled together from sensory experiences we share with animals? Our nearest living relatives, chimps, do not make art. But they can clearly be captivated by a waterfall — or, as another frankly wild recent study showed, a crystal. More than a century ago, Darwin speculated that animals "have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have." And as we learn more about animal minds and uncover more results like this one, my suspicion is that we'll eventually move beyond feeling itchy about anthropomorphizing animal experience and just admit that chimps find crystals beautiful and dancing parakeets enjoy a good beat.

This paper was so beautifully and clearly written that I think I'm best off letting the authors speak for themselves:

These results remind us that much of the beauty we find in nature was intended for receivers other than ourselves.

Footnotes

[1]: Human preference correlates with animal preference (linear mixed model (LMM): F_1,34.9 = 6.2, P = 0.02). Stronger animal preference predicts stronger human preference (generalized linear mixed model (GLMM): χ²1 = 6.0, P = 0.01). Humans 51 ms faster to pick more attractive sounds (GLMM: χ²1 = 32.0, P < 0.01).

[2]: This is a general finding from across several experiments, each with different statistics. Check out table S1 in the paper supplementary materials for more.

[3]: There was also a very weak but statistically significant trend in men agreeing more with animals than women, but this was so weak and inconsistent that the researchers cautioned against making anything of it and didn't even list the relevant statistics in the main text of the paper. I mention it here only because I find it funny.

[4]: χ²1 = 8.5, P < 0.01.

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