As cute and lovable as seals are, their contributions to the musical canon have, frankly, been minimal at best.

But that could theoretically change now that researchers in Scotland have taught three gray seals to actually sing songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and the “Star Wars” theme.

Scientists at the University of St. Andrews raised the seals from birth in order to study how successful the animals might be at vocal learning, a skill crucial for learning a language but one that is relatively rare in animals.

According to a new report published in the scientific journal Current Biology, researchers wanted to see whether the seals could be taught to copy melodies and human formants, the parts of speech sounds humans use to encode information.

“For example, different vowels only differ in their formants,” researcher Vincent Janik explained to New Scientist.

The seals were trained to copy sequences of their own sounds, and then to turn those into melodies.

The animals also learned to copy human vowel sounds, Janik said.

It wasn’t easy at first, but the seals eventually caught on.

“It takes hundreds of trials to teach the seal what we want it to do, but once they get the idea they can copy a new sound pretty well at the first attempt,” he said.

One seal, named Zola, learned to bark out both “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and the theme to “Star Wars,” as the video here demonstrates.