Can dogs show musicality?
Scroll through #SingingDog hashtags on social media, and you will find many clips of hounds howling along to their favourite tunes. But can a canine Callas show any real musicality?
That’s the question that psychologist Aniruddh Patel at Tufts University in Massachusetts and his colleagues have attempted to answer with an ear-catching new study, which shows that some doggy divas really are perceiving pitch and adjusting their vocals accordingly.
The researchers were inspired by descriptions of wolves’ howling in a pack. “Howling has some similarities to human singing, in that these are long, sustained vocalisation,” says Patel.
