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Gibbons on helium sing like sopranos

White handed gibbon

Singing is particularly important to gibbons, which use loud calls and songs to communicate across the dense jungle.(Source: plinney/iStockphoto)

Jungle divas Gibbons use the same technique to project their songs as top opera singers.



It is a skill only mastered by a few humans, yet gibbons are able to do it with minimal effort, says Takeshi Nishimura from the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University.


"Our data indicate that acoustic and physiological mechanisms used in gibbon singing are analogous to human soprano singing, a professional operatic technique," Nishimura and colleagues write in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology .

Fine tuning



Making gibbons sing on helium may sound eccentric, but Nishimura said it was a logical way to test how the animals controlled vocalisation when the resonance frequencies in the vocal tract are shifted upwards.


His team used a captive white-handed gibbon to record 20 calls in normal air and 37 calls in a helium-enriched atmosphere to show how the animals could consciously manipulate their vocal cords and tract (listen to the audio in the box above to hear their calls).

They worked out the gibbon's vocal tract had been adjusted by analysing the sounds it produced.


Tags: animals, animal-behaviour, anatomy, mammals