Have a look at what this dolphin is saying
16 Feb 2009 by Evoluted New Media
In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have examined not the sound, but the shape dolphin ultrasound makes in the water.
In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have examined not the sound, but the shape dolphin ultrasound makes in the water.
The key to the work is the CymaScope - a new instrument that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image - for the first time - the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water.
Kassewitz, of the Florida-based dolphin communication research project SpeakDolphin.com said: “There is strong evidence that dolphins are able to 'see' with sound, much like humans use ultrasound to see an unborn child in the mother's womb. The CymaScope provides our first glimpse into what the dolphins might be 'seeing' with their sounds."
Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin's natural environment-water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.
CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins.
Reid said that the technique has similarities to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. “Jean-Francois Champollion and Thomas Young used the Rosetta Stone to discover key elements of the primer that allowed the Egyptian language to be deciphered. The CymaGlyphs produced on the CymaScope can be likened to the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. Now that dolphin chirps, click-trains and whistles can be converted into CymaGlyphs, we have an important tool for deciphering their meaning.”
