Boys in all-male choirs lift up singing several notches when girls are in audience, finds study

The Animal Kingdom is full of myriad mating practices, where the males of the species attempt to woo the females. We humans are hairless primates after all, and recent study has shown that our species too, in a matter of speaking, fluff out our feathers and perform a dance for the females.

As per a research article published in The Royal Society, boys in all-male choirs tend to boost their vocals when girls are in the audience.

Mating call

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Researchers based their observation on a renowned boys' choir group. They noticed that the basses — the oldest boys with the deepest boys — "boosted their acoustic prominence by increasing energy in a high-frequency band of the vocal spectrum when girls were in an otherwise male audience".

The effect, as per the report, was particularly seen in the oldest boys, aged between 16 and 19.

Researchers pose that this behaviour may be similar to that observed in "non-human animals" like flashing fireflies, chorusing crickets and frogs. In such species, the "simultaneous cooperation and competition is manifest in rhythmically coordinated communal displays produced by groups of males to attract female mates," write the researchers.

They further say that such displays "can be a side effect of sexually motivated competition, whereby individual males produce earlier or more intense signals that mask rival signals."

But do the girls like it?

Apparently they do. For the purpose of this research, male and female listeners were given recordings of an all-male choir. These recordings were from shows where the audience was all male, and another where female members were in the audience.

Listeners either reported which audio they believed had this mating call behaviour, or which one they preferred. It was found that while male listeners could "eavesdrop" on the behaviour, female listeners were both sensitive to it and also displayed a preference for it.

"It's really subtle and probably something that's subconscious," said Peter Keller, one of the authors behind this research while talking to The Guardian.

"The boys' singing sounds more brilliant and has a more attractive, ringing quality when girls are in the audience, but it is subtle," said Keller, a professor of neuroscience at Aarhus University in Denmark.

(With inputs from agencies)