Music in our ears: do some languages sound more pleasing than others?

This scientific project is driven by three enthusiast researchers (a linguist, a cognitive scientist, and a neuroscientist). To obtain linguistic material we are using social networks with geolocation and crowdsourcing. Our informants can use their smartphones to record voices and to share the recordings with investigators. The question we are investigating is a simple one: do some languages sound aesthetically more pleasing than others to listeners from other countries? Perhaps there are some universal preferences for particular sounds or speech melody, or perhaps what languages we find beautiful is wholly determined by our own mother tongue. To find out, we first need to obtain standardized recordings of many world languages, and here is where you come in!