{"id":611299,"date":"2026-09-25T11:00:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/611299\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T11:00:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T11:00:19","slug":"madagascan-lemurs-use-operatic-trick-to-hit-high-notes-new-research-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/611299\/","title":{"rendered":"Madagascan lemurs use operatic trick to hit high notes, new research finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 September 2026, 15:49 | Updated: 24 September 2026, 16:23<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A new study on lemurs has revealed they use the same technique as opera singers.<\/p>\n

Picture:
\nAlamy<\/p>\n


\n\"Facebook
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Researchers have found that lemurs use the \u2018formant tuning\u2019 technique taught to opera singers to reach the high notes.<\/p>\n

That pretty tune you hear next time you\u2019re wandering through the rainforest, might not be as accidental as you think.<\/p>\n

It turns out that one type of lemur, native to Madagascar, uses the same technique as opera<\/a> singers when they sing.<\/p>\n

Scientists from the universities of Warwick, Turin and Madagascar have been observing wild indri lemurs, and it turns out their mouth movements are coordinated with their vocal frequency<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The researchers, whose work was published in the Journal of Computational Biology, looked at 83 video recordings of 19 wild indris and used motion-tracking technology to track their lip position. <\/p>\n

Read more: Lemurs can sing with rhythm just like us, new study finds<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Indri lemurs use opera technique to sing<\/p>\n

Dr Chiara De Gregorio, honorary research fellow at the University of Warwick, said that they\u2019d observed \u201cthe kind of fine-tuned coordination between voice and body that we usually associate with trained human singers, not with a lemur singing from the forest canopy.\u201d <\/p>\n

She added: \u201cEvery time the pitch of an indri\u2019s song rose, we could see its mouth opening wider, frame by frame.\u201d <\/p>\n

This technique is known as formant tuning and is a technique used by professional singers to enhance their voices. Lemurs use it to enhance their long-distance communication in the dense forests of their native Madagascar. The researchers claim that this is the first demonstrable evidence of vocal-tract coordination in a non-human primate. <\/p>\n

The indri is a critically endangered primate whose existence is threatened by illegal hunting and habitat destruction. <\/p>\n

Other research earlier in the year found that siamang (a member of the gibbon family) singing has a layered structure, including separate \u201cvoices\u201d that can each be rhythmic and combine into a more complex pattern. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"24 September 2026, 15:49 | Updated: 24 September 2026, 16:23 A new study on lemurs has revealed they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-611299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}