Katharine Payne

Katharine Payne
Katharine Payne 2009
Born	Katharine Boynton 1937 (age 79–80)
Spouse	Roger Payne (m. 1960; div. 1985)

Katharine 'Katy' Boynton Payne (born 1937) is a researcher in the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. Payne studied music and biology in college and after a decade doing research in the savannah elephant country in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, she founded Cornell's Elephant Listening Project in 1999.

Initially a researcher of whales with her then husband Roger Payne, Payne turned to investigating elephants after observing them at the Oregon Zoo in Portland. In 1984, she and other researchers discovered that elephants make infrasonic calls to one another that might be detectable at distances as far as ten kilometers. The calls aided in travel and mating. Payne founded the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) to use these calls as a means of measuring the behavior of elephants and the size of the elephant population. Payne was featured in the 1984 PBS series The Voyage of the Mimi.

In 2004, Payne's initial recordings of elephants were selected as one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.

Katy Payne and her husband worked at sea to Bermuda in 1968. With the help of a Navy engineer, Frank Watlington monitored hydrophones many miles into the sea to capture the sounds of the humpback whales. After 31 years of analyzing the recordings. Payne discovered the predictable ways in which the whales change their songs each season and, with her colleague Linda Guinee, also discovered that whales use rhymes in their songs. The spectograms of the whale voices showed peaks, valleys, and gaps. The visual representation of the whales vocalization looked like melodies and rhythms according to Payne.