Seals who sing Star Wars theme and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!

Guwahati: You might have heard parents asking their kids to sing rhymes and songs in front of guests and friends, but can you imagine seals singing Star Wars theme and even the famous children's rhyme ‘Twinkle Twinkle’? Biologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has made this possible by training three seals to sing or to be precise, mimic human vocalizations and music.

The lead researcher of the study, Amanda Stansbury said, "Copies were not perfect but given that these are not typical seal sounds it is pretty impressive. Our study really demonstrates how flexible seal vocalizations are. Previous studies just provided anecdotal evidence for this."

The results of the researchers are published in the journal Current Biology. A video of the seals singing has also been released that shows the seals kicking off with a tune that resembles the Star Wars theme.

The scientists are of the view of that the ability of the seals to mimic new sounds might lead them to find new ways to study speech disorders.

As informed by the scientists, training the seals was not easy as they were not instant mimics. The seals were first made to go through training to match sounds from their natural repertoire and it is only after this process, they were taught to copy more human-like vocalizations.

As a part of the speech training, the researchers had to play notes and combinations of vowels to the seals. The seals then echoed these notes and vowels back. Of the seals, Zola did this particularly well. She could copy up to 10 notes of songs which also included the classic children's melody Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

This is certainly pretty cute to see the seals mimicking but the researchers’ goal is something else. Study co-author Vincent Janik said, "Finding other mammals that use their vocal tract in the same way as us to modify sounds informs us on how vocal skills are influenced by genetics and learning and can ultimately help to develop new methods to study speech disorders."

Also read: Researchers develop algorithm for better robot-human synergy