"The Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) is a unit within the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. BRP develops digital recording equipment, computer software, and algorithms that are used by scientists around the world to study animal communication and to monitor the health of wildlife populations. BRP is also pioneering new techniques for censusing and tracking wildlife with arrays of microphones placed in natural environments around the globe."
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/
What are they up to in this lab? What is the science of sound? Why is it important to study sounds? How does this relate to SP?
Also see - http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/
The study of animal sounds is difficult because humans rely on assumptions about their own language that may not be true for animals.
Elephant communication involves not only sound but also vision and especially smell. Elephants can also sense detailed patterns in seismic signals (vibrations in the ground), but there isn't enough information to know whether this is used to exchange information between individuals.
The BRP website states why we study sounds:
"One of the rewards of analyzing sound recordings from our study sites is stumbling across an interesting looking spectrogram, taking a listen, and realizing that we have the territorial chest-beating of a lowland gorilla silverback, or the morning wake up advertisement of a great touraco!"
Here are what African forest elephants sound like. Not the typical elephant sound you would think.
African forest elephants talk