A group of Austrian, Czech and Swedish researchers conducted a study to analyze the legendary singer's voice. While they couldn't substantiate claims that Mercury had a four-octave vocal range, they discovered some interesting findings about the voice once described as "a force of nature with the velocity of a hurricane."

Through examining archive recordings, and filming the larynx of a rock singer imitating Mercury's singing with a high-speed camera running at over 4000 frames per second, the researchers found a physical phenomenon called 'subharmonics'. This is an intentional voicebox distortion using both vocal folds and ventricular folds to produce an extreme 'growling' sound which is traditionally used by Tuvan throat singers in Mongolia.