Elephants are among the most socially complex mammals on Earth. Their family groups maintain long-term relationships, recognise familiar individuals and coordinate their movements across vast landscapes. Communication is central to this social organisation, and much of it takes place through low-frequency vocalisations known as rumbles.
Scientists have long understood that these calls can convey information about an elephant’s identity, emotional state and behaviour. However, elephant communication is not always a conversation between two individuals. Frequently, several elephants rumble at once, producing overlapping vocalisations that can continue through extended social interactions.
Until recently, relatively little was understood about the information contained within these collective calls.
A new study published in Scientific Reports on 1 October 2026, using recordings of wild African elephants from Amboseli National Park in Kenya, has provided important new evidence. Researchers found that overlapping elephant rumbles contain information about the social context in which they occur. They also discovered that, during certain interactions, individual elephants’ calls become more acoustically similar.
The findings raise an interesting possibility: elephant communication may operate not only at the level of individual animals, but also through coordinated vocal exchanges involving entire groups.
How do elephants communicate over long distances?
African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) possess a remarkably varied vocal repertoire, including trumpets, roars, snorts and rumbles. Of these, rumbles are among the most frequently used and important for maintaining social contact.
Rumbles are low-frequency vocalisations produced by vibrations of the vocal folds. Some contain frequencies below 20 hertz, the approximate lower limit of human hearing, meaning that portions of the calls are inaudible to us.
Low-frequency sound can travel considerable distances, particularly under favourable environmental conditions. Research has demonstrated that elephants can recognise the voices of familiar individuals from approximately 1.5 to 2 kilometres away, while particularly powerful rumbles may be detectable over much greater distances.
This ability is especially valuable for an animal that lives in large, socially complex groups and frequently moves through vegetation that restricts visibility.
Elephants can use their calls to maintain contact when separated, recognise members of their wider social network and coordinate activities such as group movement. Previous research has even identified evidence that elephants use individually distinctive vocal labels when addressing particular individuals, suggesting a form of name-like communication.
Yet studying individual rumbles provides only part of the picture.
Elephants frequently vocalise together, and previous research indicates that approximately 60% of their rumbles occur in choruses involving two or more overlapping voices.
Understanding these choruses may therefore be essential to understanding elephant communication as a whole.
What happens when elephants rumble together?
Elephant societies are organised around closely associated family groups, typically consisting of related females and their dependent offspring. These families form part of wider networks of related and familiar elephants, with groups periodically separating and reuniting.
During these interactions, elephants produce different types of vocal exchanges.
When separated individuals attempt to locate one another, they may exchange contact rumbles. When familiar elephants reunite, greetings can involve several individuals vocalising simultaneously, often accompanied by physical contact and conspicuous behavioural displays.
Other rumble exchanges occur when elephants appear to be coordinating their next movements or maintaining cohesion during group activities.
Researchers have traditionally concentrated on individual, non-overlapping calls because they are easier to isolate and analyse. When several elephants rumble simultaneously, their vocalisations blend together, making it difficult to distinguish individual callers and measure the structure of each sound.
This has left an important gap in our understanding of elephant communication.
If several elephants vocalise together, does the resulting chorus simply contain overlapping individual messages? Or does the combined exchange carry additional information about the group’s social activity?
What the Amboseli research discovered
The new study, led by Louis Mahon and colleagues, examined recordings of individually known elephants from Amboseli National Park, collected over several decades between 1986 and 2022.
The researchers investigated both individual rumbles and overlapping vocal choruses across six behavioural contexts, including greetings, contact exchanges and calls associated with coordinating movement.
Using acoustic analysis and statistical classification, they examined whether different social situations were associated with recognisable patterns in the elephants’ vocalisations.
Their first finding was that the behavioural context of an elephant chorus could be predicted from its acoustic structure significantly better than chance.
In other words, the sound of several elephants rumbling together contained measurable information about the circumstances in which the calls were produced.
The researchers also found that individual rumbles and choruses produced in similar contexts shared acoustic characteristics. A classification model trained on individual calls could still identify the context of overlapping choruses better than chance.
This suggests that elephants participating in a chorus are not necessarily producing unrelated sounds. Instead, their individual calls often share characteristics associated with the same social activity.
However, the classifications were far from perfect. Some contexts were frequently confused, and the researchers emphasised that elephant vocalisations vary considerably between individuals and situations.
The findings demonstrate that elephant choruses contain meaningful acoustic patterns, but they do not mean scientists can reliably determine exactly what elephants are communicating simply by listening to a recording.
Do elephants change their voices to match one another?
Perhaps the most interesting discovery was evidence of a phenomenon known as acoustic convergence.
Acoustic convergence occurs when individuals modify their vocalisations during an interaction so that their calls become more similar in particular acoustic characteristics.
This phenomenon has been documented in several social animals, including dolphins, parrots, songbirds and primates. Depending on the species and circumstances, it has been associated with social bonding, territorial interactions and coordination between individuals.
The Amboseli researchers investigated whether a similar process occurs when elephants rumble together.
They found evidence of acoustic convergence in three of the six behavioural contexts examined: greetings, contact rumbles and cadenced rumbles, a type of exchange associated with coordinating activity.
During these interactions, the calls produced by different elephants tended to become more acoustically similar as the exchange progressed.
Importantly, this does not mean the elephants were producing identical calls or necessarily imitating one another deliberately. Rather, measurable features of their vocalisations became more alike.
The pattern was particularly interesting because convergence occurred in both social greetings and exchanges associated with maintaining contact or coordinating group activity.
The researchers suggested that rapid acoustic convergence may help elephants coordinate shared actions, although its precise function remains uncertain.
Not every type of vocal exchange showed convergence, indicating that the phenomenon may depend on the social circumstances and the purpose of the interaction.
Why might elephants need group-level communication?
Elephant societies are unusually complex, with relationships extending far beyond the immediate family unit.
Related families may associate closely, while wider social networks allow elephants to recognise and interact with individuals they encounter less frequently.
These relationships are maintained across landscapes where animals are continually moving, feeding, separating and reuniting.
For elephants, communication is therefore not simply about recognising another individual. It may also be important for coordinating the activities of several animals with different immediate needs.
A family preparing to move must maintain cohesion. Separated elephants need to establish contact. Groups encountering familiar individuals may engage in elaborate greeting exchanges.
The new findings suggest that overlapping vocalisations could play a role in these collective processes.
For example, acoustic convergence during prolonged contact exchanges may be associated with the process of bringing separated individuals together. Similar convergence during cadenced exchanges could be involved in coordinating subsequent movement.
These remain possible explanations rather than demonstrated functions.
The study did not establish whether elephants deliberately adjust their voices to influence other group members, or whether the convergence itself changes the behaviour of the animals receiving the calls.
Nevertheless, the findings suggest that studying a chorus as a complete social interaction may reveal information that would be missed by analysing each rumble independently.
Do different elephant families have different voices?
The study also found evidence that acoustic patterns vary between individual elephants and family groups.
When researchers trained their classification models using calls from particular elephants and then tested them on previously unseen individuals, accuracy declined. It fell further in some comparisons involving different family groups.
This suggests that individual identity influences the acoustic characteristics of rumbles, even when elephants are communicating in similar behavioural contexts.
Previous studies have already established that elephants possess individually distinctive vocal signatures, allowing them to recognise familiar callers.
The new findings raise further questions about whether elephants from the same family might develop shared acoustic characteristics through repeated interactions.
In other social species, long-term vocal convergence can contribute to group-specific calling patterns or dialects.
Whether comparable processes occur in elephant families remains uncertain. Differences between family groups could reflect individual vocal characteristics, learned vocal adjustments, inherited traits, environmental influences or a combination of these factors.
Further research will be needed to determine whether repeated short-term convergence contributes to longer-term similarities between members of the same social group.
What do scientists still need to understand?
Although the new study provides evidence that elephant choruses contain information about behavioural context, it also identifies important limitations.
The researchers were able to distinguish different social contexts better than chance, but classification accuracy remained moderate. Elephant calls are highly variable, and the boundaries between behavioural contexts are not always clear.
For example, contact exchanges between separated elephants may gradually develop into greeting calls as the animals approach one another. Those greetings may then transition into vocal exchanges associated with coordinating subsequent activity.
Such transitions make it difficult to assign every call to a single, clearly defined category.
The study also relied on recordings from a limited number of well-known elephant families, with uneven sample sizes across some behavioural contexts.
Perhaps most importantly, the researchers did not conduct playback experiments to determine how elephants respond to different types of choruses.
Playback studies could help establish whether elephants distinguish convergent from non-convergent exchanges, and whether those differences influence their behaviour.
This would be an important step towards understanding whether acoustic convergence has a direct communicative function rather than simply accompanying particular social interactions.
Researchers will also need to investigate whether similar patterns occur across different elephant populations and whether acoustic convergence is influenced by social relationships, age, familiarity or environmental conditions.
Understanding elephant communication as a collective process
For decades, research into animal communication has largely focused on the signals produced by individual animals. Yet in highly social species, communication frequently involves several individuals calling at once.
Elephants are a particularly interesting example because their social relationships are extensive, their vocalisations can travel long distances, and overlapping calls are a common feature of their interactions.
The new Amboseli research provides evidence that these choruses are not simply collections of unrelated sounds. Their acoustic structure varies with behavioural context, and individual calls can become more similar during particular exchanges.
What remains to be established is how elephants interpret these collective signals and whether acoustic convergence helps them coordinate their behaviour.
For elephants living across large landscapes such as Tsavo, communication is fundamental to maintaining the social relationships that underpin their lives. Understanding these vocal exchanges may eventually reveal more about how elephant families remain connected, organise their movements and respond to changing conditions.
Scientific reference
Mahon, L., Pardo, M. A., Miron, M., Chemla, E., Granli, P., Njiraini, N., Moss, C., Keen, S. C. & Poole, J. (2026). Social context information and acoustic convergence in elephant vocal choruses. Scientific Reports, 16, 27961.