A horse’s whinny is unlike any other sound in nature

When a horse whinnies, it is making two sounds simultaneously as no other animal can: a low-pitched noise made in a similar way to a cow’s moo and a high-pitched whistle made in its throat.

It has long been known that a horse’s whinny contains both a low-frequency sound, around 200 hertz, and a high-frequency sound, above 1000 hertz – a phenomenon known as biphonation. The low-frequency component is easily explained by vibrations in the horse’s laryngeal vocal folds, similar to human speech or singing. But the high-frequency sound is unusual for such a large animal, and how it is produced has been a mystery.

“Although humans have been co-existing and co-evolving with horses for 4000 years, we still understand their communication imperfectly,” says Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna, Austria.

To solve the puzzle, Fitch and his colleagues first performed a range of tests, scans and experiments on horse larynges obtained from a horse meat supplier.

“We blew air through them and initially we only got the low component,” says Fitch. “But with some playing around, we were able to obtain the high-frequency component as well.”

This showed that both components are produced by the larynx itself, unlike human whistling, which is performed with the lips.

For further proof of the whistling mechanism, the researchers blew air and helium, two gases of different densities, through the larynges. By comparing these gases, the researchers could test whether the high-frequency sound came from whistling or from tissue vibrations.

“The low-frequency component is produced by vocal fold vibration, just like human singing or a cow mooing, and it didn’t shift when we changed between gases,” says Fitch. “But the high-frequency component does significantly shift to be higher in helium, just as predicted for whistles.”

Endoscopic tests of live horses showed that, at the onset of a whinny, muscles around the larynx contract. This causes a narrowing of the glottis, the part of the larynx where the vocal folds are, tilting the vocal folds and increasing airway resistance. That forces air through the slit-like opening at high speed.

Mice and rats can also produce laryngeal whistles, but in their case it is at a frequency too high for humans to hear.

“Horses are the only mammal known to use the larynx to produce two frequencies simultaneously where one is a whistle and, in fact, they’re the only large mammal, besides humans, to produce whistles as part of the standard vocal repertoire,” says Fitch.

“It’s the first strong, experimental evidence of an aerodynamic laryngeal whistle production in any animal outside the rodent family,” says Ben Jancovich at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Fitch and his colleagues speculate that the whistle may make the whinny more noticeable and may help the sound carry further, but these hypotheses haven’t yet been tested.