April 26, 2024

Balkan Travellers

Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, aggregated from sources all over the world

The study says that whales have “vocal fry” just like people

comment

Kim Kardashian does it. So did Scarlett Johansson and Katy Perry.

And it turns out that many whales also use “acoustic fry,” the deep, gritty audio recording of these celebrities and a growing number of young American women.

The exception to the animal group, which includes sperm, orca whales, dolphins and porpoises, use “vocal fry” to help find their prey, according to the paper published Thursday. the Stady in Science Magazine She found that whales, like people, have at least three vocal registers: a normal voice, a fake voice, and that larval squeak.

“The similarities we find are really striking,” said Koen Ellemans, an audiologist at the University of Southern Denmark who co-authored the study. “This is the first evidence of large-scale registry use in any animal, besides humans.”

Among Americans, vocal fry can be divisive. Some find the low, guttural voice annoying. Others warn that the harsh tone makes potential employees less attractive. radio stations get complaints About hosts who finish their sentences with a scribbled voice.

But the ranks of vocal monks are growing, Especially among young women. Criticism of vocal fry is viewed by many squeakers as sexist social policing of women’s voices. And many of today’s celebs—including Kardashian, Johansson, and Perry—often speak on the bold record, according to Ellemans.

Among whales, the creaking sound is crucial to the survival of megafauna mammals.

How whales use their “voice”

Ellemans and his colleagues found that toothed whales use both regular and strumming records to communicate with each other. They keep the fry’s vocal record for navigation.

See also  The Biden administration's moves to tackle the increase in Venezuelan immigrants draw criticism from both the left and the right

Noisy water forces dolphins to “shout” to each other

Able to dive more than a mile underwater, many of these whales hunt in almost complete darkness. Animals use sounds to find their way underwater, sending out powerful pulses and listening for echoes to locate their meal.

According to the study, toothed whales rely on vocal larvae to perform echolocation clicks. Under the sea, air is precious—and it’s possible that whales evolved to use the lower register for echolocation because they use air more efficiently.

According to Elllmans, the vocal fry “certainly brought toothed whales a little too far.”

his team A series of experiments showed that whales produce their extensive repertoire of sounds with the same organ – the vocal lips in their nostrils, which vibrate much as the larynx does in humans. To come to this conclusion, his team filmed the movement of tissues on trained bottlenose dolphins and porpoises with a high-speed camera, and also recorded land whales with tiny audio recording tags.

These whales are on edge. Now comes climate change — and wind power.

“They show, to some extent, that the physical mechanism is the same as ours,” said Andrea Ravinani, a comparative bioacoustician at Aarhus University in Denmark and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. Wrote an opinion article on whale vocalization in the same issue of Science.

“The result is completely unexpected and mind-boggling,” he added.