The Animal Highlight

S2E10: Seismic Elephants

Claudia Hirtenfelder and Hannah Hunter Season 2 Episode 10

Hannah Hunter unpacks the seismic and infrasonic communication of elephants who produce and listen to sounds beyond human ranges. This season is all about “Animals and Sound” and was extracted from Season 4 of The Animal Turn Podcast.


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Credits:

  • Claudia Hirtenfelder, producer and host 
  • Hannah Hunter, co-host
  • Christiaan Mentz, sound editor and producer 
  • Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
  • Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
  • Learn more about the team here. 


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  • Thank you to the sponsors of the fourth season of The Animal Turn podcast, “Animals and Sound,” where this animal highlight was originally aired 2 May 2022. They are 

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A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

The Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.

Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.

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00:00 - Introduction 

 

02:09 – Elephants’ Low Frequency Sounds

  • Elephants don’t only listen with their ears. They have vocal chords that are eight times the size of our vocal chords. They are able to send out two kinds of sound waves at once. This includes the higher frequency calls that we are able to listen to but they also have low frequency waves. The low frequency waves travel through the Earth, these infrasonic waves are below the range of human hearing (below 20 hertz).
  • Because of the ways that sound waves travel high frequency sounds travel much quicker and travel less far. 
  • Katharine Payne at Cornell was among the first to realize that elephants communicate in this infra-sonic ground-based way and because these low frequency sounds travel so far this means that elephants can communicate with each other over kilometers away. How do they hear these sounds? 

 

04:10 – Seismic Communication and Elephants’ Feet

  • Elephants listen to infrasonic sounds partially with their feet. They observed different listening poses that elephants would have. Such as standing still and picking up their foot and pointing their toe to the ground, this was an indication that new information was coming in. 
  • This is seismic communication and it works well for elephants because of elephants’ incredibly sensitive feet. 
  • Elephants have receptors in their skin that are hardwired to a part of their brain where touch signals are processed.  In elephants these receptors are clustered around the edge of their foot. Elephants have fatty feet so when they press their foot to the ground it spreads out their foot enlarging the surface area by as much as twenty percent. This allows them to hear these infrasonic sounds. They might be listening to other herds of elephants or thunderstorms. Interesting PBS Documentary about this.
  • Many ways to experience sound that go beyond human ranges. If you want to know more about elephant listening check out the elephant listening project at Cornell. 


09:20 - Credits



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