Peter Gabriel has announced his participation in a project which aims to get chimpanzees to communicate via video conference.

Of course the former Genesis frontman and ‘Shock the Monkey’ singer is no stranger to working with apes. In 2001 he made the headlines for his involvement in a project to get chimps to play the keyboard. For the past few years Gabriel has been working with the Interspecies Internet Project, which includes one of the ‘fathers of the internet’ Vint Cerf, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Neil Gershenfeld and cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss.

The Interspecies Internet Project plan to run their ape-Skyping experiment at the Chimpanzee rescue centre Monkey World in Dorset. “The idea is to extend a big video network that already exists in labs at [MIT] so that different species including our own have a chance to communicate,” said Gabriel. “I am also interested in how they would use the internet to communicate.” The next step after that would be looking at how they could communicate further with us.

Talking to The Guardian Dr Bridget Waller, director of the Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Portsmouth said of the project “I think we’re already pretty good at communicating with primates when they’re in captivity.” She added that communication systems with Chimps exist “In the 70s there was the idea to try and teach [chimpanzees] sign language to see if that would help them communicate with us,” and that “We use touchscreens in our facility at the Isle of Wight, with macaques. We have shared communication systems in place. We know what some of their facial expressions and gestures mean. Whether videoconferencing will help that, I’m not entirely sure.”

While Gabriel is trying to talk with the animals, his former band mate Phil Collins has announced he is officially coming out of retirement. Neither musician has ruled out the possibility of a Genesis reunion either, with the band not playing with Gabriel as the lead singer for 32 years.