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Are you a fan of Leotyne Price? How about Luciano Pavarotti? These are just two of the greatest soprano opera singers. Most of us know only Tony or Carmela from the acclaimed HBO series entitled The Sopranos, but neither could match the vocal skills of true sopranos or interestingly enough...a gibbon; an ape native to tropical and subtropical rain forests.

 Gibbons have developed rich vocalizations suited for living and communicating in the thickly forested trees. Their vocalizations are so distinctive that the song can be used to determine which type of Gibbon is singing and from which region the gibbon resides.

Researchers in Japan have discovered that gibbons and trained sopranos use vowel changes, resonance tuning and other techniques to produce the range and subtleties associated with opera singing. The study, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, explains how recording gibbons singing under the influence of helium gas reveals a physiological similarity to human voices. The research was led by Dr. Takeshi Nishimura from the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan. His team studied the singing of a white-handed gibbon species (Hylobates lar) at Fukuchiyama City Zoo, in northern Kyoto.

"The complexity of human speech is unique among primates as it requires varied soft sounds made by the rapid movements of vocal tracts," said Dr. Nishimura. "Our speech was thought to have evolved through specific modifications in our vocal anatomy. However, we've shown how the gibbons' distinctive song uses the same vocal mechanics as soprano singers, revealing a fundamental similarity with humans."

Using Gibbon calls recorded normally and in helium-enriched environments, the researchers determined that the gibbons were using techniques similar to humans to make their vocalizations.

"The lowest frequency of harmonics is amplified in a gibbon's song when performed in normal air," said Nishimura. "However, in a helium-enriched atmosphere the tuning of the vocal cord vibration and the resonance of the vocal tract are altered as the gas causes an upward shift of the resonance frequencies."

Perhaps the gibbons aren't just telling each other the best locations for fruit; maybe they are performing the arias from La Boheme or La Traviata...in C-minor of course.