If your dog, or one you’ve seen in a viral video, howls along to music or another dog’s howls like it’s trying to sing a song, it’s not just making some random noise in response to external stimuli. That dog might actually be trying to match the sound’s pitch.
A small study published in Current Biology suggests that some domestic dogs can adjust the pitch of their howls to match sounds they hear, a behavior that has been previously observed in wolves. Researchers wanted to test the ability of fine-tuning vocal pitch during group howling to see whether this trait is a lingering remnant that survived domestication or if it faded away along with some other wild traits on the wolves’ path to becoming our sweet, lovable doggy companions.
Certain dog breeds are considered ancient, like Samoyeds and Shiba Inus, because their genetic lineage is a lot closer to wolves than most other dog breeds. The researchers recruited owners of some of these dogs and played them some of the usual sounds dogs howl at, like songs and emergency vehicle sirens. They then altered those recordings just a bit by shifting the pitch up or down. Then they sat back and just waited for the dogs to respond, if they responded at all.
The Dogs Are Singing, Johnson
There wasn’t a single, uniform discovery, but a small, noticeable pattern arose. Three of the four Samoyeds involved adjusted the pitch of their howls to better match songs like “Believer” by Imagine Dragons and “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper from the soundtrack of A Star Is Born. From that phrasing, you’d think the fourth dog did nothing, but actually did something a bit fascinating: it modified the pitch but then also modified the tonal quality of the sound, aka its spectral centroid. The Shiba Inus are less musically inclined. They didn’t change pitch, but one of them did alter the spectral centroid.
The ability to pitch shift is something most humans can do naturally. And it’s only been about 100 years since we figured out how to do it technologically, and soon, applying it to music post-production processing. Nowadays, you might better know it as one of the most popular (and arguably overused) pieces of audio processing software in the music industry: auto-tune, the thing that makes good singers sound great and bad singers sound like robots.
Turns out, dogs can naturally do this, too. Of course, that means it’s only a matter of time before they develop their own version of autotune.
In wolves, all that coordinated howling with some pitch variation thrown in serves a purpose in making a group sound bigger and more intimidating than it actually is to ward off larger predators. For some reason, evolution and domestication didn’t erase this wild trait.
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