Researchers discover a hidden whistle inside a horse’s whinny
A horse’s whinny can sound like two calls at once. One part sits low and rough, like a familiar mammal voice. Another rides high, almost piercing, and it does not seem to fit a 500-kilogram animal. That mismatch has bothered researchers for years. Big bodies usually mean big larynges, and big larynges usually mean low pitches. Yet horses break that pattern in a very public way, every time they call across a field. Reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, a team says it has pinned down the mechanics behind that strange blend. Horses, they argue, create a two-frequency sound by using two sound sources at the same time: vibrating vocal folds for the lower tone, and a whistle formed inside the larynx for the higher tone. “We now finally know how the two fundamental frequencies that make up a whinny are produced by horses,” says author Elodie Briefer of the University of Copenhagen. “In the past, we found that these two frequencies are important for horses, as they convey different messages about the …
