Jonna Jinton in a white dress on a misty summer meadow in northern Sweden, with the herd gathered behind her. The stillness of the scene is part of why her kulning videos travel so widely.
Kulning is an old Scandinavian herding call: a high, carrying, almost wordless song that farm women and girls in Sweden and Norway used for centuries to bring cattle, goats and sheep home from distant pastures. The video below shows the Swedish artist Jonna Jinton singing it in a foggy field, and within moments a herd of cows comes walking, then trotting, towards her.
It looks like magic, and it is easy to see why the clip has been shared so often. But there is a clear, practical story behind it, involving acoustics, animal learning and a rural tradition that almost disappeared. Here is what kulning is, who Jonna Jinton is, and what the cows are really responding to.
What kulning is
Kulning, also known as the Nordic herding call, grew out of the summer-farm system. In many parts of Sweden and Norway, livestock spent the warm months on upland grazing grounds, often called fäbod in Swedish, while the women and girls who looked after them lived in simple huts nearby. To call the animals in at milking time, or to signal across a valley to the next farm, they used calls pitched far above normal speech.
The practice goes back at least to medieval times. Regional names vary, including kauka, lålla and lockrop, and in Norway the calls are called kulokk. Individual calls were sometimes handed down in families, and some named particular animals, often the lead cow whose response would bring the others along.
The musical character is distinctive: long, unaccompanied phrases that can slide through half-tones and quarter-tones, with a lonely, slightly melancholy colour typical of Nordic folk music. Unlike yodelling, which flips rapidly between registers, kulning tends to hold a bright, focused head tone.
Why the sound carries so far
The point of kulning was distance, and the technique is built for it. Singers use a loud, directed, non-vibrato head voice rather than a soft falsetto. Acoustic studies cited in the Wikipedia article on kulning report that this voice keeps better vocal-fold contact and loses far less intensity over distance: in one comparison at 11 metres, ordinary head voice dropped about 25 decibels while kulning dropped only about 9.
High, pure tones also stand out against wind, water and rustling leaves, and they bounce cleanly off hillsides. In a valley, a good call could be heard by animals and people a long way off.
Who Jonna Jinton is
Jonna Jinton is a Swedish photographer, painter and video maker who grew up in Gothenburg and, at 21, moved north to Grundtjärn, a tiny village close to the Arctic Circle where her mother was born and her family has roots. Her work draws on the forests, lakes, snow and northern lights around her home, and her YouTube channel has introduced kulning to a very large international audience.
She has said she first heard kulning on a school trip to a museum at around the age of twelve. In the post on her blog that accompanied this video, she described spending the night of her birthday outdoors, wandering land once farmed by her ancestors and wondering whether the cows would answer the old calls.
Earlier reposts of the clip described her as 26 at the time. The video went viral around mid-2016, when sites such as Nature World News shared it.
Watch the herd respond
As the call rises over the mist, cows that were scattered across the field lift their heads, then file towards her in a loose line. Keep the sound on; the effect is very different on mute.
Do the cows remember an ancient call?
A common claim shared with the video is that the cows recognise the call through some inherited, ancestral memory. There is no evidence for that, and the video cannot show it: it offers no comparison with other sounds, and we do not know how familiar these particular animals were with Jinton or the field.
A simpler explanation fits what we know about cattle. Cows are curious, social animals that learn quickly to link a sound with a person, with food or with being brought in. Traditional herders relied on exactly that, using the same calls day after day, so the herd learned what they meant. Jinton herself has spoken in later videos about a favourite cow that is always first to arrive, which suggests a relationship built over time. A novel, striking sound in a quiet meadow would also catch any herd's attention, and once the lead animals move, the rest follow.
None of that makes the scene less moving. It shows a real partnership between people and animals that rural communities refined over hundreds of years.
A tradition with a second life
As farming modernised during the twentieth century, the summer-farm way of life declined and, with it, everyday kulning. The calls survived through folk musicians, archive recordings and studies, such as the collection of Swedish calls described in To Call the Cows Home, a paper shared on the Academia.edu platform.
Today kulning is enjoying a revival. Folk artists such as Lena Willemark have recorded it, the Danish musician Myrkur has used it, the Norwegian band Gåte drew on it for their 2024 Eurovision entry, and the singer Christine Hals provided kulning-style vocals for Disney's Frozen. Online, videos like Jinton's have sent many people searching for the word for the first time.
If you would like to hear more, look for recordings by Scandinavian folk singers, or for singers in Sweden and Norway who teach the technique. It is a demanding technique, so take care of your voice and learn from an experienced teacher.
Sources: Wikipedia: Kulning; Northern Wilds: Who is Jonna Jinton, and what is kulning?; The Kid Should See This: Scandinavian cow herding call; Jonna Jinton's blog. Video and photo: Jonna Jinton, shared via Nature World News and WION.
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