I was just getting ready for my day of calculating the ratio of unique words to total words in a bunch of journal articles about spinal cord injury and regeneration when it struck me that there really aren’t enough nice pictures of elephants in our lives. Not mine, anyway. Please enjoy the following picture of Chikwenya (left) and Mike (right), two African elephants from Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe. The wavy lines in the middle of the bottom part of the photograph are a spectrogram of an elephant “rumble.” See the things labelled F1 and F2 in the panels to the left and right? Those are the first formant (F1) and second formant (F2) of Chikwenya and Mike’s rumbles. In a human language, it’s the height and spacing of the first and second formants that identify the various and sundry vowels. Want to know more about African elephant rumbles? See Anton Baotic and Angela Stoeger’s recent paper on the topic:
Baotic, Anton, and Angela S. Stoeger. Sexual dimorphism in African elephant social rumbles. PloS one 12.5 (2017): e0177411.
Want to know more about formants and vowels? Encourage me in the Comments section.
Off I go for breakfast (see below) and a nice day of calculating the ratio of unique words to total words in a bunch of scientific journal articles about spinal cord injury and regeneration…
