Humans share acoustic preferences with other animals.

Abstract

Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefer some sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergent evolution may generate similarities in preference across species and underlie Darwin's conjecture that some animals "have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have." In this study, we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a range of animals, that the strength of human preferences correlates with that in other animals, and that humans respond faster when in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we found greatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, and lower-frequency sounds. Humans' music listening experience was associated with preferences. These results are consistent with theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acoustic preferences, and they confirm Darwin's century-old hunch about the conservation of aesthetics in nature.