Elephant Vocal Repertoire
If we want to understand the communication system of any species, it's important to know how many different vocalizations the animals can make. It's like having an list of all of the "words" that the animals can say. We can then try to figure out what each word means.

The vocal repertoire refers to all the different types of sounds a species makes. Although we have recorded over 2,000 vocalizations, they appear to fall into eight main acoustic categories. Two of these, the croak and rev, had never been described before! Almost all of the calls we have recorded are noisy rumbles, loud rumbles, or rumbles, and they occur in many different situations. We believe there are different call types within each of these broad categories and are currently examining changes in elephant behavior to determine which acoustic differences are meaningful to the elephants.

Click on the items below to listen to the calls.