Oops we crossposted there Amos! Thanks but I can't take the credit for the thread title. "Elephonic Rhapsodies" is the name of the latest CD released by the Thai Elephant Orchestra. The soundclip I posted first is from that CD.

I've been most pleasantly elephantized this morning, investigating this stuff! Click here for more insights into the innate musical genius of elephants ...

Elephants are natural candidates for music-making. Their hearing is much keener than their sight, and they employ a vast range of vocalizations, many of which are heard on their CD, to be released by the New York-based Mulatta Records....

Ancient Romans and Asian mahouts, or elephant handlers, have noted elephants' ability to distinguish melodies, and today's circus elephants follow musical cues.

In 1957, a German scientist, Bernard Rensch, reported in Scientific American that his test elephant could distinguish 12 musical tones and could remember simple melodies even when played on different instruments, at different pitches, timbres and meters. She still recognized the tones a year and a half later ...

The players improvise distinct meters and melodic lines, and vary and repeat them. The results, at once meditative and deliberate, delicate and insistently thrumming, strike some Western listeners as haunting, others as monotonous.

Mr. Sulzer wondered whether Prathida, a 7-year- old orchestra member whom he called "the Fritz Kreisler of elephants," would recognize dissonance. "I put one bad note in the middle of her xylophone. She avoided playing that note - until one day she started playing it and wouldn't stop. Had she discovered dissonance, and discovered that she liked it? She outsmarted the researchers."

Y'know, I have this sudden urge to go tickle some ivories ... ttyl!