S2E10: Seismic Elephants

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.

 Featured: 

• Grad Review with Bailey Hilgren and Hannah Hunter on The Animal Turn.
• Silent Thunder: in the presence of elephants by Katharine Payne. 
• How Elephants Listen…With Their Feet by PBS. 
• The Secret Lives of Elephants by Caitlin O'Connell.
• The elephant listening project at Cornell.

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. 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Sponsor:

• 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 

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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The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:09 Elephants’ Low Frequency Sounds
• 4:10 Seismic Communication and Elephants’ Feet
• 9:20 Credits

Transcript

00:00 - Introduction 

• Welcome to Season 2 of The Animal Highlight. 
• This season is focused on “Animals and Sound” and was extracted from Season 4 of The Animal Turn Podcast (Grad Review with Bailey Hilgren and Hannah Hunter).
• This season I am joined with a co-host, Hannah Hunter. A PhD Candidate in Geography at Queen’s University and a member of the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory.
• This episode focuses on elephants. 

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

• Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring The Animal Turn Podcast.
• Thank you also to the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory who were sponsors for the fourth season of The Animal Turn podcast that was focused on “Animals and Sound” where these animal highlights were extracted from. 
• A big thank you to Hannah Hunter for co-hosting this season of The Animal Highlight
• Co-hosted by Claudia Hirtenfelder and Hannah Hunter. 
• This episode was produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and edited by Christiaan Mentz. 
• The logo and episode artwork were created by Rebecca Shen. 
• Show notes compiled by Claudia Hirtenfelder