Sandara Park: This is the only nonhuman orchestra in the world


	October 10, 2024

Original photo by Andrew Woodley/ Alamy Stock Photo

There's an elephant orchestra in Thailand.

In 2000, musician Dave Soldier and conservationist Richard Lair co-founded the Thai Elephant Orchestra, a group of elephants who live — and make music — at a conservation center near the city of Lampang in northern Thailand. Back in 1957, scientist Bernhard Rensch posited that elephants could remember melodies and distinguish between basic scales. This inherent musical ability inspired Soldier (who also goes by David Sulzer in his professional life as a neurobiologist) to give elephants a chance to perform music of their own. He developed the concept with Lair, who believed it would be a great way to raise necessary funds and interest for elephant conservation.

The Thai Elephant Orchestra released their eponymous debut album in 2001, featuring six young elephants performing improvisational music. The band went on to release two more albums: 2004's Elephonic Rhapsodies, and 2011's Water Music. The tunes usually revolve around local Thai music traditions and incorporate giant, steel-enforced drums specially built for the elephants to whack. Some elephants can even play the harmonica by blowing air through their trunks. According to Soldier's website, the orchestra features as many as 16 elephants at any time, and a group of four elephants performs for several minutes each day for guests at the conservation center.

These elephants are so musically gifted that in 2012, a human orchestra performed an arrangement of their original compositions for a live audience in New York City. After the performance, when asked to guess the composer, audience members speculated that the music had been written by such great talents as John Cage or Antonín Dvorák. To the delight of everyone, the geniuses behind the music were later revealed to be a group of elephants.

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A medieval engineer invented an elephant clock.

Ismail al-Jazari was among the most prolific inventors of the 12th and 13th centuries, so much so that his work was a major influence on Leonardo da Vinci. One of his most clever creations was a beautifully intricate elephant clock, which was illustrated in his 1206 manuscript The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. The clock was built atop the back of a copper elephant and used a mechanism called a ghatika: a bowl designed to slowly sink into a tank of water. The bowl was attached to a figure of a scribe by a rope, and as the bowl sank and tugged on the rope, the scribe moved in a circular motion to indicate the number of minutes past the hour. Once the bowl was full of water, it triggered a ball to fall and collide with a fan, which rotated to show how many hours had passed since sunrise. The ball would then activate a mallet to collide with a cymbal, triggering the whole vessel to tilt and begin the cycle again.