"The first time I really listened to a horse whinny that I had recorded, I was confused because I thought there were two horses as if there [were] two voices at the same time. Briefer created a visual representation of the sound file, called a spectrogram, to inspect the whinny more closely. And that's when she saw two frequencies occurring at the same time: one high and one low."
"Larger animals tend to produce lower vocalizations, and the high-pitched part of the horse whinny seemed too high for such a big creature. Among mammals, it's quite uncommon, at least when it appears all the time in one type of sound. A fair number of birds can produce two simultaneous frequencies like this, but horses producing this ability consistently is remarkable."
Animal behavioral scientist Elodie Briefer discovered that horses produce whinnies containing two simultaneous frequencies—one high and one low—a phenomenon she initially found confusing when analyzing recorded sounds. Using spectrograms to visualize the audio, she identified this dual-frequency vocalization pattern. This ability is unusual among mammals, though common in some bird species. Briefer's childhood experience with horses near Geneva provided context for her later scientific curiosity. Her research team conducted experiments to understand how horses achieve this complex vocalization, revealing that the unique anatomy of their vocal tract enables this simultaneous two-tone production. The findings were published in Current Biology.
Read at www.npr.org
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