This dog breed doesn’t just howl, they sing along to their favorite songs
If your dog, or one you’ve seen in a viral video, howls along to music or another dog’s howl as if 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 pitch of the sound.
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 previously observed in wolves. Researchers wanted to test the ability to fine-tune vocal pitch during group howling to see if this trait is a long-standing remnant that survived domestication, or if it was lost along with some other wild traits on wolves’ path to becoming our sweet, lovable canine companions.
Certain dog breeds are considered ancient, like Samoyeds and Shiba Inus, because their genetic lineage is much 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 that dogs howl at, such as songs and emergency vehicle sirens. They then slightly altered these recordings by moving 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 was not a single consistent finding, but a small noticeable pattern emerged. 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 A Star Is Born soundtrack. From that phrasing, you’d think the fourth dog did nothing, but actually did something a little fascinating: it changed the pitch, but then also changed the tonal quality of the sound, also known as its spectral center of gravity. Shiba Inus are less musically inclined. They did not change the pitch, but one of them changed the spectral center of gravity.
The ability to change pitch is something most people can do naturally. And it’s only been about 100 years since we figured out how to do it technologically and soon applied it to music post-production. Today, you might know it better 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 good and bad singers sound like robots.
It turns out that dogs can of course do this too. Of course, this 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 serves the purpose of making a group sound bigger and more intimidating than it actually is to ward off larger predators. For some reason, evolution and domestication did not erase this wild trait.
