Bats are ‘death metal singers’ with ‘unparalleled’ vocal range: Study

Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson fans may disagree but latest scientific research-based evidence argues that bats too are the death metal singers and exceptional ones as they possess unparalleled voice range. Scientists have discovered that bats greet each other with death metal growls and possess a vocal range, which is far from the one that most humans, if not all, including Halford and Dickinson, possess.

Bats possess 'unparalleled' vocal range

The study, published in Plos Biology, points out that bats produce very diverse vocal signals for "social communication" among other things, with an impressive frequency range of 1 to 120 kHz or seven octaves.

Very few human singers have a vocal range of five octaves, Mariah Carey and Prince being the famous examples. The legendary Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar had a vocal range that extended more than three octaves while her sister Asha Bhonsle has a vocal range of four octaves. Pakistani singing legend Noor Jehan also had the vocal range of four octaves. 

"This tremendous vocal range is unparalleled in mammalian sound production and thought to be produced by specialised laryngeal vocal membranes on top of vocal folds," it said. 

"Bats extend their lower vocal range by recruiting their ventricular folds—as in death metal growls—that vibrate at distinctly lower frequencies of 1 to 5 kHz for producing agonistic social calls," it added.

Researchers who led the study said that if one listens to a bat colony in the summer, these calls for social communication can be heard very clearly. 

"We don’t know the function of the calls, but they make them when they are annoyed with each other, and when they fly away or join a colony," Prof Coen Elemans, who led the research at the University of Southern Denmark, said in a statement.