Abstract Emotionally relevant external events, hormone concentrations affecting mood and appetitive behaviour, thirst and hunger are able to stimulate a complex central nervous network that regulates endocrine feedback and behaviour in order to maintain or regain homeostasis. Particular states of mood or emotion may thus be accompanied by specific behaviours, vocalization being one of them. Hence, in farm animals vocalizations may supply us with hints on their well-being in an easy way, given that the meanings of the respective calls are well-established. Then, it is possible to judge acoustically uttered current needs and impaired welfare by non-invasive, continuous monitoring. Vocalizations may also modulate emotions of the receivers such that welfare may also be affected in conspecifics hearing distress utterances, e.g., in an abattoir. For these reasons, the analysis of farm animal vocalization has gained increasing interest in the last years and a variety of attempts to decode the meaning has been made. Concentrating on important farm animal species (pig, cattle, poultry) an overview of the present state-of-the-art in this discipline is given and present problems as well as possible future developments are discussed. Modern techniques of sound analysis have provided tools to discriminate, analyse and classify specific vocalizations. Taking advantage of this, future bioacoustical research for welfare assessment should focus on comprehensive studies of a broad spectrum of species specific distress vocalizations. Increasingly precise attributions of such utterances to environments, behavioural contexts and relevant physiological parameters will lead to a deeper understanding of their meaning and significance with respect to well-being of farm animals. The result will offer applicable acoustic tools for farming environments where non-invasive techniques for welfare judgements are urgently needed.