About ELP
The Elephant Listening Project (ELP) is a nonprofit group associated with the Bioacoustics
Research Program (BRP) at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.
Since its inception in 1999, ELP has worked to assess the potential of acoustic monitoring
as a tool for evaluating the abundance and health of African elephant populations. Our founder,
Katy Payne, discovered that elephants produce infrasonic vocalizations, below the level of human
hearing. The ELP team spends hours each day pouring over sound files and organizing data related
to elephant calls. Some of our earliest research was centered on low-frequency communication in
savannah elephants, but in recent years the focus has been on forest elephants in the Congo Basin
of Central Africa. Because forest elephants live in dense rainforests, capturing their sounds allows
us to study aspects of their lives that are impossible to observe directly.
Research Program (BRP) at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.
Since its inception in 1999, ELP has worked to assess the potential of acoustic monitoring
as a tool for evaluating the abundance and health of African elephant populations. Our founder,
Katy Payne, discovered that elephants produce infrasonic vocalizations, below the level of human
hearing. The ELP team spends hours each day pouring over sound files and organizing data related
to elephant calls. Some of our earliest research was centered on low-frequency communication in
savannah elephants, but in recent years the focus has been on forest elephants in the Congo Basin
of Central Africa. Because forest elephants live in dense rainforests, capturing their sounds allows
us to study aspects of their lives that are impossible to observe directly.