Thai Elephant Orchestra: The Most Talented Pachyderm Ensemble You've Ever Seen

Thai Elephant Orchestra is an experimental musical ensemble comprised completely of pachyderm performers.

Initiated by David Sulzer (a.k.a. Dave Soldier) and Richard Lair in 2000, the elephant ensemble enables its creators (a neuroscientist and conservationist, respectively) to explore the musical predilections of the large animals while investigating their cognitive abilities.

The trunk-ified troupe began as a quintet of just five elephant musicians. The uncanny orchestra ensemble now counts 14 proboscis-possessing pets who perform on a wide array of customized instruments including specially built drum kits, marimbas and xylophones.

As covered by NPR, the unique elephant orchestra was borne of Sulzer's advanced insight into the creatures' musical listening habits, enabled by Lair's access to the elephants' home conservation centre in Lampang, Thailand. Sulzer tells NPR of the Thai Elephant Orchestra:

"Elephants like to listen to music: If you play music they'll come over, and in the morning when the mahouts take them out of the jungle, they sing to to calm them down ... So what we came up with was, well, maybe if we made ergonomic instruments that would be easy for elephants to play -- for instance, marimbas and drums that are giant -- perhaps they would play music."

NPR reports that the elephant ensemble's oeuvre includes both completely improvised musical pieces as well as human-cued compositions, taking direction from Sulzer as conductor. The group performs only from their home base at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center and have released five albums to date: Thai Elephant Orchestra (2001), Elephonic Rhapsodies (2005) and their most recent effort, 2011's Water Music.

Soldier described to the BBC some of the individual elephants' instrument preferences:

"Mei Kot likes to smash the hell out of a gong. Chapati is very, very good at the bass," says Soldier, co-founder of a group that boasts it weighs three times as much as the Berlin Philharmonic.

Below, watch a great performance from the Thai Elephant Orchestra.

What do you think of the amazing musical talents of the elephants in the Thai Elephant Orchestra? Let us know in the comments section down below.

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