India, Aug. 15 -- Over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin wrote, with some astonishment, that a range of animals appeared to have "nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have".

He was talking about plumes, feathers and, yes, sound too.

Now, a paper published in the journal Science, in March, confirms that humans do indeed share a range of acoustic preferences with other animals.

The paper is the result of a study by Logan S James, an animal communications research associate at University of Texas, Austin, alongside researchers from the universities of Melbourne, Auckland, Montreal, and Yale.

To test Darwin's idea, James and the team built a gamified online experiment played by over 4,000 participants. The task was simple: As mating ...