Musical animals

Amazing: rats can also recognize octaves

(Bild: Sergey - stock.adobe.com)

High C and low C - humans can perceive tones separated by an octave as similar - this is important for music and speech development, among other things. But rats also have this ability - called octave equivalence.

In any case, humans can perceive melodies as belonging together regardless of pitch and sounds as belonging together despite differences in frequency. "We don't have to be taught this, we do it automatically, for example when we sing together, simply because we have different pitched voices," explained scientist Marisa Hoeschele in a press release.

Do animals also have this ability? The team led by Bernhard Wagner and Marisa Hoeschele from the Institute of Sound Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) investigated the question, as reported in the journal "Royal Society Open Science".

Rats reacted amazingly
The researchers played various notes to rats in the laboratory. When the rodents responded to certain notes - such as the middle four in an octave - they received a reward. The animals were then played other notes, but also the same notes in other octaves. In the experiment, the laboratory rats responded to these tones shifted by one octave. This indicates that they were perceived as similar despite the different frequencies.

According to the authors, the results indicate that octave equivalence is widespread in mammalian species or could be natural due to the harmonic vocal structure, i.e. not culturally learned. However, further research is still needed in this area.