Heard an interesting piece on NPR Morning Addition on the way to work this morning. Before a female mosquito will mate with a male, he has to adjust the sound his wings make to a specific frequency. She then chimes in at another frequency and together they make a nearly perfect 5th. This then creates an overtone. Only when the overtone begins, do they mate!

Below is a bit of an exerpt that you can you can use to perhaps spice up your own romantic life:>)

If Music Be The Food Of Love

What makes A. aegypi so unusual in the animal world is how precisely it modifies its tones.

Rex Cocroft is a behavioral biologist at the University of Missouri who has recorded the sounds made by numerous kinds of insects. He says many animals, from birds to katydids, use sound in mating behavior. This experiment showed something new.

"We think of insects as being masters of timing and rhythm and not so much as masters of pitch," Cocroft says.

There's a field of science called biomusicology, he says, that investigates the idea that what we like in music may derive from what we've heard in the natural world.

"For example, when people were writing early melodies like Gregorian chants," Cocroft says, "when you have a large jump up in frequency, then you tend to drop down stepwise, and people were asking, 'Well, do animals show similar kinds of rules?'"

If that sounds crazy, consider this: The interval between the male mosquito's tone and the female's is quite close to what musicians call a perfect fifth.

In fact, composers for centuries considered the interval of a fifth to be the most euphonious. So if mosquitoes have it right, all you need is a melody with an interval of a fifth and you'll be guaranteed romantic success. The composer of that romantic chestnut "Feelings" apparently figured that out: The first two notes are a perfect fifth.

The entire article or podcast can be found here.