With the help of a recent approach conducted in a laboratory in which researchers artificially created infra-sounds in the laboratory, they have come with their new claims revealing that elephants follow their extremely low-pitched vocalizations to produce speech in humans too by hitting those lowest notes.

African elephants, the so-called greatest communicators in the animal kingdom, have ability to converse over the miles and that too with their extremely low-pitched vocalizations called infra-sounds at a very low frequency range of lesser than 20 Hertz, or cycles, per second, right?

Following similar path, Mr. Christian Herbst from the University of Vienna and his colleagues from Germany, Austria and the United States performed a research with the help of the lynx of a deceased elephant and created artificial infra-sounds and found that “elephants rely on the same mechanism that produces speech in humans (and the vocalizations of many other mammals) to hit those extremely low notes”.

They explained that the notes are so low that they are out of the range of human hearing and thus they hear only the harmonics of those sounds.

Researchers initially weren’t clear if those infra-sounds are created by intermittent muscle contractions or by flow-induced vocal fold vibrations but the new research has opened their chances to study the mechanism firsthand.