Gibbons use soprano techniques in forests: Study

Researchers have found that gibbons use the same technique to project their songs through the forests of south-east Asia as top sopranos singing at the New York Metropolitan Opera or La Scala in Milan.

Japanese scientists who conducted tests on the small apes used helium gas to see how their singing changed when their voices sounded abnormally high-pitched.

They found the animals could amplify the higher sounds by adjusting the shape of their vocal tract, including the mouth and tongue much like professional singers.

Takeshi Nishimura from the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University said it was a skill only a few humans had been able to master but gibbons are able to do it with minimal effort.

According to Nishimura, making gibbons sing on helium might sound eccentric, but it was a logical way to test how the animals controlled vocalisation when the resonance frequencies in the vocal tract were shifted upwards.

He said in an interview that using the helium environment, it was possible to see how the resonance worked and how the gibbon made its loud pure-tone calls.