Posts tagged vocals
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
The man who holds the record for the world’s lowest voice can hit notes so low that only animals as massive as elephants are able to hear them. U.S. singer Tim Storms can reach notes as low as G-7 (0.189Hz). That’s a remarkable 8 octaves below the lowest G on a piano. So low, in fact, that even Storms himself cannot hear it.
Helium reveals gibbon’s soprano skill
Apes are unlikely to become virtuosos at the opera house, but gibbons have naturally mastered some of the vocal techniques that human sopranos rely on, scientists in Japan report.
The research shows that, like humans, gibbons use a ‘source–filter’ mode of sound generation. The sound originates from the creatures’ vocal folds as a mixture of different harmonics, which are multiples of the frequency at which the vocal folds vibrate. The resonant frequencies of the vocal tract then determine which of these harmonics are projected. By altering the position of the mouth, lips and teeth, humans vary these resonant frequencies to make the different sounds required for speech.
The gibbon’s melodious calling bears many similarities to the techniques of human singers. Like professional sopranos, gibbons tune the resonant frequency of their vocal tract to the pitch frequency generated by the vocal folds to amplify the sound. Acoustic physicist Joe Wolfe of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, says that this type of “resonance tuning” is something that comes fairly easily to human singers and is key to their ability to project their voice over a loud orchestra.
How Low Can You Go? Physical Production Mechanism of Elephant Infrasonic Vocalizations
Elephants can communicate using sounds below the range of human hearing (“infrasounds” below 20 hertz). It is commonly speculated that these vocalizations are produced in the larynx, either by neurally controlled muscle twitching (as in cat purring) or by flow-induced self-sustained vibrations of the vocal folds (as in human speech and song). We used direct high-speed video observations of an excised elephant larynx to demonstrate flow-induced self-sustained vocal fold vibration in the absence of any neural signals, thus excluding the need for any “purring” mechanism. The observed physical principles of voice production apply to a wide variety of mammals, extending across a remarkably large range of fundamental frequencies and body sizes, spanning more than five orders of magnitude.
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