Madagascan lemurs use operatic trick to hit high notes, new research finds

24 September 2026, 15:49 | Updated: 24 September 2026, 16:23

Researchers have found that lemurs use the ‘formant tuning’ technique taught to opera singers to reach the high notes.

That pretty tune you hear next time you’re wandering through the rainforest, might not be as accidental as you think.

It turns out that one type of lemur, native to Madagascar, uses the same technique as opera singers when they sing.

Scientists from the universities of Warwick, Turin and Madagascar have been observing wild indri lemurs, and it turns out their mouth movements are coordinated with their vocal frequency.

The researchers, whose work was published in the Journal of Computational Biology, looked at 83 video recordings of 19 wild indris and used motion-tracking technology to track their lip position.

Read more: Lemurs can sing with rhythm just like us, new study finds

Indri lemurs use opera technique to sing

Dr Chiara De Gregorio, honorary research fellow at the University of Warwick, said that they’d observed “the kind of fine-tuned coordination between voice and body that we usually associate with trained human singers, not with a lemur singing from the forest canopy.”

She added: “Every time the pitch of an indri’s song rose, we could see its mouth opening wider, frame by frame.”

This technique is known as formant tuning and is a technique used by professional singers to enhance their voices. Lemurs use it to enhance their long-distance communication in the dense forests of their native Madagascar. The researchers claim that this is the first demonstrable evidence of vocal-tract coordination in a non-human primate.

The indri is a critically endangered primate whose existence is threatened by illegal hunting and habitat destruction.

Other research earlier in the year found that siamang (a member of the gibbon family) singing has a layered structure, including separate “voices” that can each be rhythmic and combine into a more complex pattern.