How a Horse Whinnies: With a Whistle and a Song

In a laboratory in France, researchers examined horse larynges, adding tubes and helium to tease apart how a whinny is made. They concluded a whinny combines two mechanisms: a low, sung tone from vibrating vocal folds and a high, whistled tone produced when air is forced through the larynx.

The findings appear in a paper in Current Biology. The larynx is a muscular tube whose vibrating tissues produce sound, and larger animals typically have lower voices. That pattern seemed broken by horses, which produce both high and low frequencies. Over a decade ago, Elodie Briefer noticed two distinct high- and low-frequency sounds occurring at the same time on a spectrogram; she said, "Everyone thought that horses were making frequencies that were much higher than predicted by the body size," and "They hadn't realized that actually below that high pitch, there is a low pitch." Endoscopic video showed vocal folds vibrating for the low pitches while laryngeal structures remained still for the high pitches.

France

horse whinny, larynx, vocal folds, whistled tone, low pitch, high pitch, helium, current biology, elodie briefer, spectrogram