Talking to Dolphins: New "Dolphin Speaker" Produces Full Range of Dolphinese Sounds

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 05.16.2012 at 10:15 am 7 Comments

So Long and Thanks For All the Fish U.S. Navy photo by Veronica Birmingham

Communication with dolphins is getting better all the time — they’ve been using iPads, for one thing, and humans have been working on a type of Rosetta Stone-like two-way translation device. A new gadget could improve matters even further, by allowing humans to produce the full range of dolphin sounds. The acoustics researchers who developed it call it the Dolphin Speaker.

Plenty of work is being done with dolphin sounds, but they have mostly focused on dolphin vocalizations and their hearing anatomy. Dolphins can not only hear and produce clicks, whistles and burst pulses well outside of the range of human hearing, but they can vocalize at several different frequency ranges at once. This ocean broadband is key for communication and navigation.

To better understand how these sounds are produced, how they travel and even what they mean, researchers need to be able to play them back, watching how dolphins react. This speaker can do it, producing sounds from 6 kHz to 170 kHz. While others have worked in the low-frequency ranges, this is the first type that can cover the whole spectrum.

Researchers led by Yuka Mishima, a graduate student at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, built a new transducer sandwiched between pieces of acrylic to keep it safe from water. A quadruple piezoelectric panel can broadcast high-frequency sounds, and a single silver circle broadcasts low-frequency sounds, Mishima explains in a presentation about the research. They took it to the ocean and played some dolphin sounds, comparing the sound spectrograms with natural recorded spectrograms obtained from dolphins. The charts looked mighty similar, the researchers say.

The next step is to play back a whole sequence of dolphin noises to dolphins and watch what happens. The paper is being presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting this week.

Dolphin Speaker: The Dolphin Speaker is the first underwater setup that can project the full range of sounds made by dolphins, potentially opening a new avenue for communication with the animals. Mishima et al/Acoustical Society of America

[Acoustical Society of America via Extreme Tech]

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7 Comments

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extremechiton

05/16/12 at 11:07 am

kinda reminds me of the dolphin translator from sea quest dsv

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rettaH_daM

05/16/12 at 12:12 pm

Let's hope "so long, and thanks for all the fish" aren't their first human words.

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adaptation

05/16/12 at 3:25 pm

Setup a dolphin telephone network and let them communicate hundreds of miles apart, listening to the chatter may be very revealing.

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JoshFS

05/16/12 at 7:25 pm

Darwin!

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IceMetalPunk

05/17/12 at 10:09 am

Playing back random sounds? We could be saying something like "fish play bubble jump sleep slap hole fish urchin". Don't be surprised if we completely confuse them.

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CodeZero

05/17/12 at 11:07 am

Didn't I just read an article about dolphins communicating "holographically"? That the sounds they make are reproductions of the echo they get back from objects, we keep trying to attribute sounds to words when they speak in objects. I agree with IMP that reproducing random "words" to see what they do is illogical. I mean I can't go stand in the middle of Tokyo and start yelling out random Japanese words and wait to see what will happen, as if me shouting random words will produce an event that will be correspondant to the words I'm saying. With Dolphins being as smart (or smarter) than humans, should we expect anything but confusion and curiosity?

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC

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mmmasupporter

05/18/12 at 11:17 am

Love you All

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