When I was growing up, there was one big, mean monster of a dog always on the loose in my neighborhood that bit every kid at least once (it belonged, I think, to the house with the perpetually open front door and Busch can front-lawn decorations). When it was my turn I didn’t need to be the Dog Whisperer to know what was about to happen; the bone-rattling, guttural growls were indicator a-plenty.
In my unfortunate case, boy and dog understood each other perfectly, though certainly not all canine noises are so obvious. Scientists at Budapest’s ELTE University are now developing computer software that may one day allow people to identify the emotional undercurrents of various barks, woofs and grrrs (if I could’ve spoken with the dog that bit me, he might’ve intimated something similar to Wolf here).
As of right now, however, the project is in its rudimentary stages: recent studies showed that while the software correctly recognized 43% of dogs’ emotional reactions, humans—some without any appreciable experience with animals—were accurate 40% of the time. Needs work, sure, but if these researchers can figure out what those yippy ankle-biters on the third floor of my building are trying to convey all hours of the night then this will be the scientific breakthrough of the year, as far as I’m concerned.
According to a previously published study by the same group, analysis of emotional content conforms to E.S. Morton’s structural acoustic rules:
Low pitched barks were described as aggressive, and tonal and high pitched barks were scored as either fearful or desperate, but always without aggressiveness. In general, tonality of the bark sequence had much less effect than the pitch of the sounds. We found also that the inter-bark intervals had a strong effect on the emotionality of dog barks for the human listeners: bark sequences with short inter-bark intervals were scored as aggressive, but bark sequences with longer inter-bark intervals were scored with low values of aggression. High pitched bark sequences with long inter-bark intervals were considered happy and playful, independently from their tonality. These findings show that dog barks function as predicted by the structural–motivational rules developed for acoustic signals in other species, suggesting that dog barks may present a functional system for communication at least in the dog–human relationship.
Researchers are working toward possibly creating a viable method of dog-human communication. One, that is, that doesn’t include adopting a bad Aussie accent and giving your dog the sign of the devil.
Add a comment