The Mystery of the Singing Mice

A scientist has discovered that high-pitched sounds made by the small rodents could actually be melodious songs

  • By Rob Dunn
  • Smithsonian magazine, May 2011, Subscribe
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Matina Kalcounis Rueppell
Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell deciphers the ultrasonic chatter, shown here plotted on a spectrograph, of a deer mouse. (Lynda Richardson)

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Deer mouse

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Hear the Singing Mice

Biologist Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell played the mouse's squeaks back at a low speed, creating music that sounds like the wooing song of a whale.

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In late 1925, one J. L. Clark discovered an unusual mouse in a house in Detroit. It could sing. And so he did what anyone might have done: he captured the mouse and put it in a cage. There it produced a lyrical tune as if it were a bird. A musician named Martha Grim visited the mouse, commented on the impurity of its tones and left, musical standards being high in Detroit. Clark gave the mouse to scientists at the University of Michigan. The scientists confirmed that the mouse could sing and then bred it with laboratory house mice. Some offspring produced a faint “chitter,” but none inherited the father’s melodic chops. These observations were all noted in a scientific article in 1932 and mostly forgotten.

Recently, though, Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, revisited the mystery of the singing mouse. And after figuring out how to listen to mice on their own terms, she heard something entirely new.

I met up with Kalcounis-Rueppell and a group of her students at a field site in North Carolina. We wore hard hats and carried traps, notebooks, scales, a laptop computer, recording equipment and a web of six long cables connected to microphones into which we hoped the mice would croon. The forest where she works is not majestic or primeval; it’s surrounded by fields of corn, tobacco and cotton. But to her it is perfect. “The pine litter is quiet,” she said. “There aren’t many other singing things, like insects, on the ground. Pine forests are among the quietest forests.” Conscious of the sound of my own voice, I stopped talking as we stepped over logs and under the branches of loblolly pine trees to hook up the microphones.

When Kalcounis-Rueppell was 19, she had an internship with the University of Regina in Saskatchewan to study bat behavior. It led her outside at night, and she never really came back in. She is now a behavioral ecologist, an expert in how animals use sound. By now she has spent thousands of hours working at night in forests. She became a connoisseur of sounds: bats clicking, katydids scraping and frogs croaking. Every so often, she would hear sounds she could not identify.

Kalcounis-Rueppell suspected that some of the sounds she heard at night might be coming from mice. She knew that a singing mouse, like the one in Detroit, had occasionally been re­ported in the scientific literature, and that lab mice sometimes make sounds too high to be heard by human ears. But such high-pitched sounds had never been studied in the wild. While she was conducting research in Monterey County, California, at a site where she had been working since 1996, she wondered if local mice, two species of the genus Peromyscus, were calling all around her, perhaps even mumbling about her presence. On some nights, she thought she heard them, at the edge of her ability to hear, the way a sailor might perceive land just over the horizon.

In 2004, Kalcounis-Rueppell and a friend borrowed hand-held recorders capable of recording ultrasonic emissions and took them to her California field site. She had already captured, marked and released many of the mice there as part of a study on their behavior. She knew the individuals by name, or at least by the numbers she had given them on little tags clipped on their ears. She also knew where they lived. She put microphones in their territories and waited.

After a long night, the researchers took the equipment back to the lab. They listened to the recordings through headphones at a slow speed, which lowered the frequency of the sounds (the way you might make your own voice sound more like James Earl Jones’). They listened for unusual sounds. If they found one, they used a computer to convert the recording into a spectrograph, a kind of hill and valley plot of the sounds’ frequency.

One of Kalcounis-Rueppell’s colleagues heard something unusual, something loud. They analyzed the sound on the computer and saw a plot that was entirely new, the four-note song of what would prove to be a deer mouse. Played back at slow speed, it sounded a little like the wooing song of a whale, a plaintive rise and fall.


In late 1925, one J. L. Clark discovered an unusual mouse in a house in Detroit. It could sing. And so he did what anyone might have done: he captured the mouse and put it in a cage. There it produced a lyrical tune as if it were a bird. A musician named Martha Grim visited the mouse, commented on the impurity of its tones and left, musical standards being high in Detroit. Clark gave the mouse to scientists at the University of Michigan. The scientists confirmed that the mouse could sing and then bred it with laboratory house mice. Some offspring produced a faint “chitter,” but none inherited the father’s melodic chops. These observations were all noted in a scientific article in 1932 and mostly forgotten.

Recently, though, Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, revisited the mystery of the singing mouse. And after figuring out how to listen to mice on their own terms, she heard something entirely new.

I met up with Kalcounis-Rueppell and a group of her students at a field site in North Carolina. We wore hard hats and carried traps, notebooks, scales, a laptop computer, recording equipment and a web of six long cables connected to microphones into which we hoped the mice would croon. The forest where she works is not majestic or primeval; it’s surrounded by fields of corn, tobacco and cotton. But to her it is perfect. “The pine litter is quiet,” she said. “There aren’t many other singing things, like insects, on the ground. Pine forests are among the quietest forests.” Conscious of the sound of my own voice, I stopped talking as we stepped over logs and under the branches of loblolly pine trees to hook up the microphones.

When Kalcounis-Rueppell was 19, she had an internship with the University of Regina in Saskatchewan to study bat behavior. It led her outside at night, and she never really came back in. She is now a behavioral ecologist, an expert in how animals use sound. By now she has spent thousands of hours working at night in forests. She became a connoisseur of sounds: bats clicking, katydids scraping and frogs croaking. Every so often, she would hear sounds she could not identify.

Kalcounis-Rueppell suspected that some of the sounds she heard at night might be coming from mice. She knew that a singing mouse, like the one in Detroit, had occasionally been re­ported in the scientific literature, and that lab mice sometimes make sounds too high to be heard by human ears. But such high-pitched sounds had never been studied in the wild. While she was conducting research in Monterey County, California, at a site where she had been working since 1996, she wondered if local mice, two species of the genus Peromyscus, were calling all around her, perhaps even mumbling about her presence. On some nights, she thought she heard them, at the edge of her ability to hear, the way a sailor might perceive land just over the horizon.

In 2004, Kalcounis-Rueppell and a friend borrowed hand-held recorders capable of recording ultrasonic emissions and took them to her California field site. She had already captured, marked and released many of the mice there as part of a study on their behavior. She knew the individuals by name, or at least by the numbers she had given them on little tags clipped on their ears. She also knew where they lived. She put microphones in their territories and waited.

After a long night, the researchers took the equipment back to the lab. They listened to the recordings through headphones at a slow speed, which lowered the frequency of the sounds (the way you might make your own voice sound more like James Earl Jones’). They listened for unusual sounds. If they found one, they used a computer to convert the recording into a spectrograph, a kind of hill and valley plot of the sounds’ frequency.

One of Kalcounis-Rueppell’s colleagues heard something unusual, something loud. They analyzed the sound on the computer and saw a plot that was entirely new, the four-note song of what would prove to be a deer mouse. Played back at slow speed, it sounded a little like the wooing song of a whale, a plaintive rise and fall.

Kalcounis-Rueppell has now translated the ultrasonic utterances of the wild mice from her first study site and is working on their Eastern North American relatives. Her research and that of others suggest that some songs are produced only by males or only by females. There are even greater differences from one species to the next, akin to those, say, between a robin and a wren. Perhaps these differences help the mice tell each other apart. Some species’ songs get more complex as a mouse grows older. The songs may be innate; young mice raised in the lab by mice of a different strain retain their own strain’s song. Kalcounis-Rueppell and her students have evidence of vocalizations in four wild species and suspect that many others sing. The world of rodents, long thought mostly quiet, may be full of songs, broadcast short distances, from one animal to another, songs that we still know very little about.

I asked Kalcounis-Rueppell whether there could be mouse versions of the mockingbird—mockingmice—which mimic the songs of other animals. “No, probably nothing like that,” she said. After a pause she said, “Maybe a mockingmouse, yes, that seems possible. But who knows?”

Her discovery reminds us that each species perceives the world in a unique way, with a finely tuned set of senses, and so finds itself in a slightly different world. Bacteria call to each other with chemicals. Mosquitoes detect the carbon dioxide we exhale. Ants see polarized light. Turtles navigate using the earth’s magnetic field. Birds see ultraviolet markings on flowers, signs invisible to us. Snakes home in on the heat in a cougar’s footprint or a rabbit’s breath. Most of these different worlds are little understood because of the narrow reach of our own perceptions. Kalcounis-Rueppell hears music in the dark, but as a species we still fumble around.

I am still waiting to learn what we recorded when I visited Kalcounis-Rueppell’s North Carolina field site. Analyzing the field recordings is a slow process. That night we captured sounds near just a few mice, but the recordings require so much computer memory that they must be parsed into many separate files, 1,872 in total, which still need to be processed one by one. Maybe what we recorded was just noise, but maybe it was beautiful.

Rob Dunn’s next book, The Wild Life of Our Bodies, will be published in July.


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Comments (16)

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I am so glad I found this article. I thought I was losing my mind. We have a mouse in our house who sings. It is not a pet, but has woken us up with the most beautiful, melancholy, music. I cannot bring myself to kill it, so it lives in the laundry room and occasionally tries to steal my clothes, but at least I know what it is now.....I thought I was taking too much from the Hunger Games Trilogy...This is incredible!

Posted by Jody on March 11,2012 | 04:47 PM

When I was a child I had a mouse that sounded similar but not quite as long. There were four of them and the others just made short little noises. It is not unique. It was annoying to listen to it at night and that particular mouse died much earlier than the others. I figured the noise was some condition, making sounds of pain.

Posted by Jim Fay on July 14,2011 | 03:08 PM

I have used an article in my science class from several years ago published by the Public Library of Science/Biology by Timothy Holy and Z. Guo called The Ultrasonic Songs of Male Mice. It was interesting to read that you have also expanded on that idea.

Posted by Carol on May 21,2011 | 06:24 PM

I had a ground squirrell, she lived to be five years old... she used to sing at times, the sound she made was like the song Gizmo sang in the movie Gremlins!

At first I went crazy looking for the source of the melody and I could not believe it when one afternoon I was near my little cheeky friend´s cage, when I heard her sing.

Thank you for publishing this article! It is lovely to learn that some rodents have this ability.

Congratulations!

Posted by Marisa Van Dyck on May 17,2011 | 10:23 AM

i feel so happy because i found a article that show the discovery of singing mice.Before i was reading the article i didn´t believe about it.
This discovery opened my main and influenced to my life to search more new experience,world and things of the animals.
thanks for make a great article that the people was entered of this new discovery.

Posted by edgar olortegui on May 14,2011 | 09:13 AM

It seems like the mouse is crying :( or something.. I don't know why the audio made me feel a little sad when I heard it..

Posted by Andrea on May 12,2011 | 09:05 PM

The May 2011 article by Rob Dunn, "Singing Mice" is enjoyable, and it is good to learn about Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell's recording of deer mice singing. In 2009 I wrote a poem celebrating their song-prowess, making use of what I was able to find via the Wikipedia and some e-mail correspondence, and including a color photo of one of the mice mentioned as recorded by Kalcounis-Rueppell, Peromyscus californicus, whom I have captioned as Il Piccolo Pavarotti. You would be welcome to print the poem (no fee needed), and/or some of the introductory prose and footnotes to it, though I doubt that even if you found it readable you could fit it into your magazine. It will be published in the next year or so in an anthology, SING: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, ed. Allison Hedge Coke (University of Arizona Press); it is part of a poetry-gathering on which I have been working for a while and hope to finish this June during a writing residency at the Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, titled From The Extinct Volcano, A Bird of Paradise. The extinct volcano, as mentioned in the introductory note to the gathering (which I will include in the attachment), is Mt. Bosavi in New Guinea, whose 8,500-foot crater with snow around it, over three miles wide, has become a tropical paradise in which many new species have evolved, including a bird of paradise.

With all best wishes, and with thanks to your magazine and to Mr. Dunn and Ms. Kalcounis-Rueppell for great work.

Yours ever,

Carter Revard
Professor of English Emeritus
Washington University, St. Louis
St. Louis, Missouri 63130

Posted by Carter Revard on May 6,2011 | 06:09 PM

Listening to the singing mice, my three dogs went crazy - especially the English Setter who is an avid hunter. After sniffing every inch of my laptop, she sat staring at the computer with her head cocked. I wish I knew what she was visualizing in her head.

Posted by Michael Worobec on May 5,2011 | 03:06 PM

There is a beautiful children's book, "Sing, Little Mouse", by Aileen Fisher, 1969, that chronicles the search for a singing mouse. It's a great piece of poetry and details the natural history of a white-footed mouse!

Posted by Marcia McLaughlin on May 4,2011 | 10:51 PM

Reminds me more of wolf howls than whale song.

Posted by Mike on May 4,2011 | 06:54 AM

I was so excited when I read this article, because it reminded me of this Kafka story so much:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_the_Singer,_or_the_Mouse_Folk

Thank you, thank you, for giving Josephine a real voice!!

Posted by sprite on May 3,2011 | 11:20 PM

Had some trouble downloading the file - I am so inspired by the story of the singing mice, that I had to share with others.

Posted by Melissa Carver-Davis on May 2,2011 | 06:17 AM

So maybe that 1925 mouse had an exceptionally low singing voice for its kind, which made it audible to the humans.

Posted by endofmonth on April 27,2011 | 10:26 AM

I have to comment on the singing mice.
I grew up in a small rural town in Missouri. When I was around 5 or 6yrs old, we had a singing mouse in the house.
(I am now 72) It sounded much like a conary. As a boy of 5, it was not a big deal to me. I can remember my parents having people over to hear the mouse, but the mouse rearly cooperated. You would usually hear it in the wee hours of the morning. I don't know where it came from or what happened to it.

My mother talked about the singing mouse we once had until she died at the age of 83.

Posted by Gene Schlichtman on April 27,2011 | 09:13 AM



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