Soundboard
Animal Sounds Soundboard
Most of what is here is exactly what it says on the button: a hen clucking, a horse whinnying across a field, a cow lowing, dawn birdsong, whale song picked up on a hydrophone. No story attached, nothing viral, just a clean take of the animal doing the thing. A smaller group arrived through the internet rather than through a field recordist, the screaming goat and the marmot and the pigeon that should not be able to make that noise, and two of them are not animals at all, since the rubber duck and the screaming rubber chicken are toys with unusually good publicity.
Animal Sound Buttons
All soundboards →All 18 clips in this board, most-played first. Tap to play, open a sound for the free MP3.
About the Animal Soundboard
Four sorts of people take these away. Parents and teachers want the plain ones, because a child pointing at a picture of a cow wants the cow and nothing else. Editors want them dry and unmistakable so they can land on a chosen frame. Comedy wants the opposite of accuracy: drop a moo into a serious sentence and the sentence is finished, which is the oldest joke available and has never lost. And people building things, games and radio bits and podcasts, need a moo they can use without a licensing conversation.
Cats aim the meow at us in particular. Adult cats barely meow at each other, and the call is kept almost entirely for humans. Nicholas Nicastro's Cornell work, presented in 2002, found that the calls people rated pleasant were short and fell in pitch, while urgent ones ran longer and sat lower. Karen McComb's team went further in 2009 in Current Biology, showing that a cat asking for food embeds a high cry of around 380 Hz inside the low rumble of a purr, close to the fundamental frequency of a crying infant. Listeners who had never owned a cat still called those purrs more urgent and less pleasant. Remove the cry and the urgency goes with it.
Dogs have something like a laugh, and it has a button here. The breathy panting they make during play is acoustically distinct from ordinary panting, spread across a broader band of frequencies, which Patricia Simonet identified and then tested by playing a recording of it into an animal shelter in Spokane in 2005. Barking settled and stress behaviour dropped. The goat runs on the opposite principle. Its alarm bleat sits inside the human vocal range, so the brain files it as a person and then corrects itself, and the goat edits of 2013 built on exactly that, starting with screams cut into a Taylor Swift single.
Every clip on this page plays in the browser, works from a phone, and downloads as a free MP3 with no account. Where a sound is a toy rather than an animal, or famous because of a meme rather than the species, its page says so plainly. A few of these are the only recording of that animal most people will ever hear on purpose, which is a good reason to keep them accurate.
Animal Soundboard FAQ
The questions people ask most about these sounds.
Are these real animal recordings?
Most are genuine field or studio recordings of the animal named. A few are toys rather than animals, the rubber duck and the screaming rubber chicken among them, and their pages say so. Where a clip is famous because of a meme rather than the species, the page gives the meme as well as the animal, so you know which one you are downloading.
Why does the goat sound like a person screaming?
A goat's alarm bleat sits right inside the human vocal range, so your brain files it as a person before correcting itself, and the correction is the funny part. That mismatch drove the 2013 screaming goat wave, which began with goat screams edited into Taylor Swift's I Knew You Were Trouble and reached far enough that Taika Waititi has credited it as the source of the screaming goats in Thor: Love and Thunder.
Why do cats meow at people but not at each other?
Adult cats have plenty of ways to deal with each other and barely use the meow among themselves, so it functions mainly as a call aimed at humans. Karen McComb's 2009 study in Current Biology found that a cat asking for food tucks a high cry of about 380 Hz inside its purr, near the frequency of an infant crying, and that people rate those purrs as more urgent even when they have never lived with a cat.
Do dogs actually laugh?
They make a breathy play pant that is measurably different from normal panting, covering a wider band of frequencies. Patricia Simonet recorded it and played it back to dogs in a Spokane shelter in 2005, and the barking quietened and stress behaviour fell. Whether that counts as laughter is a fair argument, but the sound is real, it belongs to play, and it is the clip filed here as the dog laugh.
Can I use these in a video, a lesson or a game?
Yes. Every sound has a free MP3 download on its page with no account required, ready for a video edit, a class presentation, a podcast, a stream alert or a game prototype. Read the origin note before anything commercial, since a handful of these clips are famous through media that somebody else owns rather than through the animal.
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