The study of acoustic signals and the supposed spoken language of the dolphins | Hacker News Reader

The study of acoustic signals and the supposed spoken language of the dolphins

sciencedirect.com

79 pointsdarrhiggs11 comments

There are a few issues i can see here.

1. (meta-science) If this result mattered, it would be published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society (JASA), which is where all the good marine mammal acoustics work is published. This appears to be a private journal of a particular russian university, which is less than convincing, and single-author papers are always (fairly or unfairly) subject to higher scrutiny. Other weirdnesses: the paper was submitted on 16 AUG, accepted the same day, and "reviewed" within 5 days. This suggests a certain laxity of rigor.

2. This work was done in a small highly reverberant concrete-walled pool. It would be more convincing in free-field, as much of the analysis here is tightly coupled to notions of coherency, which reverberations blow right (so to speak) out of the water. Why their analysis is done in pascals SPL and not dB re 1uPa SPL (as everyone else does) is confusing.

3. There is little to no quantitative analysis of spectral features in the results or discussion. There are also multiple sentences that involve the phrase "we can assume", which I would argue is certainly not the case.

4. That dolphin clicks are spectrotemporally complex is a boring result. The authors fail to demonstrate, and in fact basically don't even claim, the assertion in the HN title.

I am saddened by how long we've known about cetacean communications--decades--and how little progress there's been, given the giant strides tech has made in DSP and pattern matching. If only we applied a fraction of the tech effort we put into cell phones or weapons.

I imagine that a large part of this is simply a lack of interest on the part of tech folks. Many fields of biology need people with coding backgrounds, but tech people are often completely unaware of this or (in my case, most of the time) have no idea how to get in touch with the people who need them.

I'd love to contribute to this kind of thing, but haven't the foggiest notion of how.

Crazy idea: Crowdsource it.

If we can gamify protein folding (https://fold.it/portal/) and find scientifically useful answers, why not the same with cetacean languages?

The reason that protein folding and other large-scale projects (e.g. SETI@Home) work is because there's enough data to go around. I think that these projects are likely bound by the fairly small bits of data they have available.

If we could get an open dataset of cetacean sounds along with a tagged assessment of the scenario (i.e. how many were around, were they agitated, etc) then this kind of project could be very interesting.

A better model is Kaggle. Kaggle releases data, and then challenges people to produce statistical models that can fit the data the best. Hundreds of people compete and best the results are usually very good.

However as far as I know there isn't that much data available for dolphins (and especially not labelled data, though the unlabelled data may be useful as well.)

People seem to be generally highly apathetic to notion that anything other than humans might exhibit complex behaviors worth studying. It probably doesn't help that there's money in cell phones and weapons, but you can't even convince people to stop killing dolphins, never mind learn something about them.

I also have to wonder if there's some deep dread that we're going to learn just what a crime our treatment of quite a few species has been, and continues to be. If we face it, gather evidence to support what is currently only a series of likely hypotheses, we might have to change our behavior or learn ugly truths about ourselves.

There was a session today at Interspeech dedicated to the study of animal vocalization, though participants acknowledged that the field is still nascent. One of the posters was on Dolphin communication: http://www.interspeech2016.org/Technical-Program

If (like me) you mainly wanted the conclusion, here it is:

> As this language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language.

And:

> The results obtained in this study suggest the existence of a similar highly developed spoken language in toothed whales (Odontoceti), based on the similarity of their acoustic signals and morphology.

I've wondered if dolphins speak to each other (assuming that they do) in a serial flow of abstract symbols-- words, like we do, or if they use their sonar to project 3-D 'holograms' of objects and shapes to each other.

Maybe even both. What a wonderful day when we crack the code.

Possibly both. Like ideo-gram writing (Egyptian, Chinese) that started as pictures but became abstract.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com