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Cited by 20Animal Vocal Communication and BehaviorPrimate Behavior and EcologyPhonetics and Phonology Research

Modeling individual vocal differences in group-living lemurs using vocal tract morphology

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Gamba, Marco, Favaro, Livio, Araldi, Alessandro, Matteucci, Valentina, Giacoma, Cristina, Friard, Olivier·2017·Current Zoology
DOI 10.1093/cz/zox023PMC PMC5804192
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Abstract

Vocal individuality is widespread in social animals.Individual variation in vocalizations is a prerequisite for discriminating among conspecifics and may have facilitated the evolution of large complex societies.Ring-tailed lemurs Lemur catta live in relatively large social groups, have conspicuous vocal repertoires, and their species-specific utterances can be interpreted in light of source-filter theory of vocal production.Indeed, their utterances allow individual discrimination and even recognition thanks to the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract.The purpose of this study is to determine which distinctive vocal features can be derived from the morphology of the upper vocal tract.To accomplish this, we built computational models derived from anatomical measurements collected on lemur cadavers and compared the results with the spectrographic output of vocalizations recorded from ex situ live individuals.Our results demonstrate that the morphological variation of the ring-tailed lemur vocal tract explains individual distinctiveness of their species-specific utterances.We also provide further evidence that vocal tract modeling is a powerful tool for studying the vocal output of non-human primates.

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  • The individuality of elephant vocal spaces is very likely a result of anatomical variability in elephant vocal tracts.

    “It is very likely that the individuality of the elephant vocal spaces we have presented here, is a result of similar anatomical variability in elephant vocal tracts.”

    From Rules of departure: Antiphony and personalized vocal spaces in wild male elephant group coordination (2024) · cites this paper as [52]

    The Abstract and Discussion report that vocal-tract morphology helps explain individual vocal differences in ring-tailed lemurs. The paper does not study elephant vocal tracts or establish that anatomical variability explains the elephant vocal spaces described by the citing authors; that is an extrapolation to another species. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Formant frequencies of ring-tailed lemurs carry information of individual identity, predominantly due to morphological variations of the shape rather than the length of the vocal tract.

    “It has been shown that formant frequencies of ring-tailed lemurs carry information of individual identity, predominantly due to morphological variations of the shape rather than the length of the vocal tract [52].”

    From Rules of departure: Antiphony and personalized vocal spaces in wild male elephant group coordination (2024) · cites this paper as [52]

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Lammert AC, Proctor MI, Katsamanis A, Narayanan SS, 2011 Morphological variation in the adult vocal tract: a modeling study of its potential acoustic impact. INTERSPEECH 2813.
  2. Pruthi T, Espy-Wilson CY, 2007 Acoustic parameters for the automatic detection of vowel nasalization. INTERSPEECH, 1925.
  3. Soma T, Koyama N, 2013 Eviction and troop reconstruction in a single matriline of ring-tailed Lemurs lemur catta: what happened when “grandmother” died? In: Masters J, Gamba M, Génin F, editors. Leaping Ahead. New York: Springer, 137– 146.

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Authors
Gamba, M., Favaro, L., Araldi, A., Matteucci, V., Giacoma, C., & Friard, O.
Affiliations
University of Turin (IT)
Corresponding author
Gamba, Marco
ORCID
Venue
Current Zoology
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2017-03-28
Volume
63
Issue
4
Pages
467-475
ISSN
  • 1674-5507 (ISSN-L)
  • 2396-9814
DOI
10.1093/cz/zox023
PMC
PMC5804192
OpenAlex
W2599347060
Cited by
20
References
59
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 1
FWCI
2.03
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by-nc
Locations
  • Current Zoology (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Institutional Research Information System University of Turin (University of Turin) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
Funders
Università degli Studi di Torino
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Developmental Biology › Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Primate Behavior and Ecology
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
Keywords
vocal individuality, Lemur catta, vocal tract morphology, source-filter model, individual recognition, social vocalizations, resonant frequency, group-living primates

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