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

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.