Whales can modulate their voice for a purpose. According to a study, celebrities have used voice modulation to impress, but whales do the same for a different reason.
Whales Modulate Voice Like Kim Kardashian to Hunt
A new study has learned that American actors and celebrities aren't the only ones who modulate their voices. Celebrities do to impress, but toothed whales like dolphins, orcas, and sperm whales create a vocal fry to help them hunt, Insider reported.
Modulating their voices is vital for dolphins to hunt, even in the deep ocean. They reportedly use their newly-discovered lips hidden in their nose the whole time.
Coen Elemans, professor of sound communication and behavior at the University of Southern Sweden and an author of the study, said in a press release that vocal fry is a normal voice register often used in American English by celebrities, including Kim Kardashian, Katie Perry, and Scarlett Johannsen. Registers are very distinct ways of vibrating the same vocal cords, Elemans told Insider.
Humans have access to three registers - the heady, high-pitched falsetto; the normal voice; and the chesty voice, where the vocal fry lives.
Researchers analyzed the whales' sounds and learned that aquatic animals use a very similar modulation. It gives them access to falsetto, allowing them to make their high-pitched whistles and the chesty vocal fry range, which they use for echolocation.
How Whales Make a Sound in the Depths
The researchers were initially puzzled about how they echolocate at huge depths of almost 10,000 feet. At those depths, the pressure of water is immense that airs get compressed.
Peter Teglberg, professor of physiology at the Aarhus University in Denmark and an author of the study, told Inside that in those depths, there's less than 1% of the air volume available for whales compared to when they are at the surface. The whales reportedly redirect the air straight to their muscles to stay alive and empty their lungs to avoid diving sickness.
The researchers spent decades trying to find out how the whales manage to produce noise at that depth. After two decades of tracking the noise of live whales, they discovered that toothed whales redirect the little air from their lungs to a pouch in their nose called a nasopharyngeal sac. The air from the pouch bypasses the lungs and the vocal cords completely. Elemans noted that whales evolved a new sound production organ in their use and didn't use their larynx.
He added that the whales pushed the air through membranes in the sac called "phonic lips" that produce a loud sound when smacked together.
Teglberg likened it o a balloon. When one blows up a balloon and tightens the nozzle, it will produce a squeaky sound.
The whales reportedly have detailed control of those sounds. Their modern nerves are normally used for the sound production system.
The study was published in the journal Science.
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