05 · Animals

Elephants: talking in infrasound

We can barely hear their voice — but it travels for kilometres through the air and through the ground.

Library → Elephants

Elephants are the most famous "infrasonic" animals on land. Their low rumbles (roughly 5–14 Hz) lie at the edge of, and below, our hearing, but for elephants they are a full-fledged language that works where ordinary sound fails — over great distances and in dense forest.

HERD — "They Heard It First." Why the mission grew out of a love for elephants.

A voice we can barely hear

In 1986 Katy Payne and colleagues first showed that the powerful "rumbles" of elephants contain an infrasonic component.1 The low frequency is not a quirk but an engineering solution: such waves attenuate weakly and bend around trees, so a herd can coordinate and search for mates kilometres away. Field playback experiments confirmed this: elephants responded to a herd-mate's call 2 km away, and the strongest calls are estimated to be audible at least 4 km away.5 The range depends strongly on the weather — in cool hours a near-surface temperature inversion acts as an acoustic lens and carries the sound even farther.6

They hear the ground with their feet

The rumble travels not only through the air but also as a seismic wave through the ground. Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell showed that elephants pick up these vibrations through the pads of their feet and their trunk, and respond to them.2 A team from Oxford later learned to distinguish elephant behaviour from the seismic signal — whether they were walking, running or alarmed.3

An elephant has two channels of communication: air and earth. Sometimes they "speak" with their feet.

Playback — how scientists "reply" to elephants

To understand the elephants' language, researchers (for example, Joyce Poole's ElephantVoices project) use playback experiments: a recorded rumble is played back through a powerful subwoofer and the reaction is observed. This is how it was found that elephants distinguish the "voices" of relatives, strangers and even dangerous sounds. It is both a tool and an ethical responsibility — one must intervene in animal communication carefully.

For the forest, where visual counting is impossible, acoustics has become the main method. The Elephant Listening Project (Cornell) has spent many years listening to Africa's forest elephants with arrays of microphones, estimating numbers and detecting poaching.4

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An honest caveat

Animals do react to the infrasound of storms and distant events — but a rigorous review found no reproducible signal for the popular idea that "animals predict earthquakes" (Woith et al., 2018). It is more honest to say so plainly — and it only strengthens trust in the rest of the facts.

Why this matters for HERD

HERD grew out of a love for elephants and pain on their behalf. The same powerful low-frequency emitter needed for playback experiments is part of our laboratory. More about our R&D →

Sources for this article

These sources are part of the full HERD library — 272 vetted sources, with meaning search and topic filters.

  1. peer-reviewed Payne K.B., Langbauer W.R., Thomas E.M. (1986). Infrasonic calls of the Asian elephant. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 18(4). springer.com
  2. peer-reviewed O'Connell-Rodwell C.E. (2007). Keeping an 'ear' to the ground: seismic communication in elephants. Physiology 22(4). physiology.org
  3. peer-reviewed Mortimer B. et al. (2018). Classifying elephant behaviour through seismic vibrations. Current Biology 28(4). cell.com
  4. organization Elephant Listening Project, Cornell University. elephantlisteningproject.org
  5. peer-reviewed Langbauer W.R., Payne K.B., Charif R.A., Rapaport L., Osborn F. (1991). African elephants respond to distant playbacks of low-frequency conspecific calls. J. Exp. Biol. 157. journals.biologists.com
  6. peer-reviewed Garstang M. et al. (2005). The daily cycle of low-frequency elephant calls and near-surface atmospheric conditions. Earth Interactions 9(14). journals.ametsoc.org
  7. peer-reviewed von Muggenthaler E. (2000). Infrasonic and low-frequency vocalizations from Siberian and Bengal tigers. JASA 108(5). doi.org
  8. peer-reviewed Barklow W.E. (2004). Low-frequency sounds and amphibious communication in Hippopotamus amphibius. JASA 115. doi.org
  9. peer-reviewed Reber S.A. et al. (2017). Formants provide honest acoustic cues to body size in American alligators. Sci. Rep. 7. doi.org
  10. peer-reviewedrebuttal Woith H., Petersen G.M., Hainzl S., Dahm T. (2018). Can animals predict earthquakes? BSSA 108(3A). doi.org
  11. peer-reviewed Pardo M.A., Fristrup K., Lolchuragi D.S., Poole J.H., Granli P., Moss C., Douglas-Hamilton I., Wittemyer G. (2024). African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls. Nature Ecology & Evolution 8, 1353-1364. nature.com
  12. peer-reviewed O'Connell-Rodwell C.E., Berezin J.L., Pignatelli A., Rodwell T.C. (2024). The use of vocal coordination in male African elephant group departures: evidence of active leadership and consensus. PeerJ 12, e17767. doi.org
  13. peer-reviewed Herbst C.T., Stoeger A.S., Frey R., Lohscheller J., Titze I.R., Gumpenberger M., Fitch W.T. (2012). How low can you go? Physical production mechanism of elephant infrasonic vocalizations. Science 337(6094), 595-599. science.org
  14. peer-reviewed Stoeger A.S., Baotic A. (2016). Information content and acoustic structure of male African elephant social rumbles. Scientific Reports 6, 27585. nature.com
  15. history Poole J.H., Payne K.B., Langbauer W.R., Moss C.J. (1988). The social contexts of some very low frequency calls of African elephants. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 22(6), 385-392. doi.org
  16. peer-reviewed McComb K., Moss C., Sayialel S., Baker L. (2000). Unusually extensive networks of vocal recognition in African elephants. Animal Behaviour 59(6), 1103-1109. doi.org
  17. peer-reviewed McComb K., Reby D., Baker L., Moss C., Sayialel S. (2003). Long-distance communication of acoustic cues to social identity in African elephants. Animal Behaviour 65(2), 317-329. doi.org
  18. peer-reviewed McComb K., Moss C., Durant S.M., Baker L., Sayialel S. (2001). Matriarchs as repositories of social knowledge in African elephants. Science 292(5516), 491-494. doi.org
  19. peer-reviewed O'Connell-Rodwell C.E., Arnason B.T., Hart L.A. (2000). Seismic properties of Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) vocalizations and locomotion. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 108(6), 3066-3072. doi.org
  20. peer-reviewed O'Connell-Rodwell C.E., Wood J.D., Rodwell T.C., Puria S., Partan S.R., Keefe R., Shriver D., Arnason B.T., Hart L.A. (2006). Wild elephant (Loxodonta africana) breeding herds respond to artificially transmitted seismic stimuli. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 59(6), 842-850. doi.org
  21. peer-reviewed O'Connell-Rodwell C.E., Wood J.D., Kinzley C., Rodwell T.C., Poole J.H., Puria S. (2007). Wild African elephants (Loxodonta africana) discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar conspecific seismic alarm calls. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 122(2), 823-830. doi.org
  22. peer-reviewed Günther R.H., O'Connell-Rodwell C.E., Klemperer S.L. (2004). Seismic waves from elephant vocalizations: a possible communication mode?. Geophysical Research Letters 31(11), L11602. doi.org
  23. review Soltis J. (2010). Vocal communication in African elephants (Loxodonta africana). Zoo Biology 29(2), 192-209. doi.org
  24. history Heffner R.S., Heffner H.E. (1982). Hearing in the elephant (Elephas maximus): absolute sensitivity, frequency discrimination, and sound localization. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 96(6), 926-944. doi.org
  25. history Heffner R., Heffner H. (1980). Hearing in the elephant (Elephas maximus). Science 208(4443), 518-520. doi.org
  26. peer-reviewed Wrege P.H., Rowland E.D., Keen S., Shiu Y. (2017). Acoustic monitoring for conservation in tropical forests: examples from forest elephants. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 8(10), 1292-1301. doi.org
  27. organization Save the Elephants. Save the Elephants — research and conservation organization (Samburu, Kenya). savetheelephants.org
  28. organization Poole J.H., Granli P. ElephantVoices — elephant communication and behavior database. elephantvoices.org
See also
Whales & the sound channel
Pigeons & the map of sound
Infrasound and health
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HERD (2026). Elephants: talking in infrasound. HERD — Infrasound library. https://theherd.network/infrasound/en/elephants