Elephant intelligence is pretty extraordinary. When they can, they form tight social and emotional bonds, which, after separation for decades and they are reunited, have very intimate reunions that last for days, during which humans avoid them except very judiciously, in that they fear being separated again.
I also remember a “behind the scenes” video shoot for an American singing star, in which a younger elephant was to be standing in the shallow ocean waves next to a beach, in the background. But that elephant had never been to the beach, and went “frolicking” in the water like a happy large dog, having a blast. They had to wait most of an hour for it to settle down enough to do the shoot.
Hopefully, researchers will follow up this violin discovery by giving elephants a library of music to choose from.
I love elephants.
But I hope we don’t find out that the beasts really did not like the music and were just trying to indicate their displeasure. After all, the frequencies at which elephants communicate all all very low, so maybe high freqs are disturbing to them. Just a thought.