Scientists Find an 'Alphabet' in Whale Songs

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/science/whale-song-alphabet.html

by tintinnabula • 2 years ago

252 198 2 years ago

nytimes.com

bradrn• 2 years ago

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

vixen99• 2 years ago

Much appreciated

robxorb• 2 years ago

The chart on page 6 (of the PDF) is fascinating, kind of sums up the findings visually.

WaxProlix• 2 years ago

Can we tokenize these signals? A ripe new market for LLM-based solutions may be opening up!

gabesullice• 2 years ago

If we could (we probably can), we'd have a fluent LLM that would generate sounds that we still couldn't understand.

pton_xd• 2 years ago

Couldn't the LLM translate it to words that have similar embeddings in our own language? Translation is one of the tasks that LLMs excel at.

Udo• 2 years ago

It's not a completely useless idea. LLMs are pretty good at relating parallel concepts to each other. If we could annotate the whale speak with behavioral data we might catch something we'd otherwise have missed. Since whale children need to start (almost) from scratch, it sounds worthwhile to tap into that for teaching an LLM alongside a real whale infant.

sieste• 2 years ago

it's an important step though. with a whale llm and chatbot we would have a tool to study whale language and communication actively rather than just being able to listen to their interactions passively. i could think of all sorts of cool experiments with an algorithm that can generate whale click sounds and elicit predictable replies from actual whales.

potatoman22• 2 years ago

From the article: “I’ve no doubt that you could produce a language model that could learn to produce sperm-whale-like sequences,” Dr. Rendell said. “But that’s all you get.”

ddon• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/7prpD

garciasn• 2 years ago

Seems like the NYT found a way to fuck with archive.is. There’s a gigantic overlay blocking a ton of the content.

Boo.

aspenmayer• 2 years ago

I found this via the topbar history nav on archive.is when visiting the original link you’re replying to:

https://archive.is/vwQ4Z

also available on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240507155229/https://www.nytim...

Etheryte2• 2 years ago

It is an SVG loading indicator that's broken when embedded on the archive page, nothing to do with NYT trying to obfuscate archival tools.

cobbzilla• 2 years ago

install uBlock Origin, block content element, it’s gone (until they change things to not match the selector anyway)

garyfirestorm• 2 years ago

Text only alternative -

https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/science...

d0gsg0w00f• 2 years ago

Never heard of txtify. Amazing

marc_abonce• 2 years ago

I've always been able to read The New York Times through Tor by using their official onion address: https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2l...

djtango• 2 years ago

Who knew that the sentient life we were looking for were beneath our feet in our deep blue oceans rather than up above the stars.

hatenberg• 2 years ago

Oh we knew.

Hyperion covers this topic quite well.

salomonk_mur• 2 years ago

Douglas Adams had it right, as usual.

BobbyTables22• 2 years ago

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

baerrie6• 2 years ago

It is less like an alphabet, we already know that there is a discreet number of click clusters (basically an alphabet). Here they have found that the sperm whales modulate tempo of these clusters, rhythm within the clusters, add additional ornamental clicks, and change the rhythm of individual clicks within clusters over time (rubato). This adds an insane order of magnitude to their language much like our use of tone, context, and all the other ways we take our alphabet and enrich it with exponentially more meaning. This is the first time this has been proven in an evolutionary lineage separate from ours!

throwup238• 2 years ago

What are the chances of us being able to decode some of that in our life time? There must be some meaning to it, even if it's not as complex as human speech.

We should do it just to make sure they're not saying "so long and thanks for all the plankton."

baerrie6• 2 years ago

Extremely likely, especially with the increasing abilities of LLM to decode unknown languages. Then the test would be for us to produce these sounds and see if the whales respond as expected.

beezlebroxxxxxx• 2 years ago

There's an enormous gap between being able to "decode" it and actually understanding what it means.

Wittgenstein's quote on lions is still relevant.

canjobear3• 2 years ago

The topic paper is part of a big project called Project Ceti that's aiming to do just that.

On the theoretical side for why it may be possible, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.11081 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10931

emmelaich3• 2 years ago

Could be just like that classic Gary Larson canine decoder cartoon.[0]

Could be more musical. I hope / fear it's something more sophisticated.

[0] https://twitter.com/Andr6wMale/status/1501487704399298560/ph...

yosito4• 2 years ago

even if it's not as complex as human speech

I wouldn't make that assumption. Just because whales don't have opposable thumbs and have a harder time making and using tools doesn't mean that their speech isn't advanced.

sam0x17• 2 years ago

So more sophisticated than a mere alphabet, if anything

baerrie6• 2 years ago

Exactly

gopher_space• 2 years ago

The people hand-rolling their own hydrophones think there might be a lot going on we simply haven’t been able to hear yet.

scotty79• 2 years ago

Maybe it's more like phoneme set.

mseepgood• 2 years ago

This adds an insane order of magnitude to their language

Do we assume they only have one language? We humans have thousands of languages.

JohnMakin5• 2 years ago

It always amazes me how science has historically tripped over itself to avoid calling what is clearly some sort of culturally defined communication as “language” when it comes to cetaceans.

I think and suspect these animals are far more intelligent than we guessed, and the ethical ramifications of that reality would be difficult to swallow. Many species of toothed and baleen whales are under threat of extinction according to a lot of climate predictions.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

Climate isn’t the biggest risk to some species. Some orcas (which are technically dolphins) don’t have enough supply of the fish they eat. Issues like river and fishery management or dam removal or ocean overfishing don’t get enough attention, but would be important to fix even if climate wasn’t an issue.

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

fishing net entanglement is still the biggest problem for some nearly extinct species like the right whale

mikrotikker• 2 years ago

Maybe that's why they started attacking boats... Hitting the competition

bullfightonmars3• 2 years ago

I think the whole point/perspective of science is that claims have to be provable with evidence. Scientists don’t make claims without evidence.

I am sure that there were a lot of preconceived biases that blocked scientific research from occurring in this space, but it might also be that we didn’t have the tools to examine evidence until recently.

Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration, and absolutely want to prove the unproven or refute the previously proven with new evidence. It’s how they make their stamp in their field.

seventytwo• 2 years ago

It’s both.

JohnMakin5• 2 years ago

Pretty sure the reason stuff like this isn’t called language is because language is circularly defined as something only homo sapiens does.

bmitc3• 2 years ago

Scientists don’t make claims without evidence.

History has shown that to not be true.

Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration

In my experience, it is the opposite. I often find scientists are in fact very uncurious when it comes to anything outside their domain of choice.

mitthrowaway2• 2 years ago

It's a claim one way or the other, isn't it?

These sounds are thought to be language

These sounds are not thought to be language

The default position ought to be "we're not sure if it's language or not", but then why are people so surprised when they find out it is?

andoando2• 2 years ago

Making unproven claims is exactly how science is advanced

stult• 2 years ago

I think the whole point/perspective of science is that claims have to be provable with evidence

Really, the whole point of science is that claims have to be falsifiable with evidence, which is more or less the opposite of provable. Nothing is ever positively proven in science, hypotheses are only ever falsified, and only hypotheses susceptible to falsification with evidence are scientific. A failure to prove a hypothesis false is the closest we come to establishing a positive scientific truth.

Teever• 2 years ago

Noone wants to admit that we brutly hunted down and genocided the nearest thing to an alien culture on our planet for some fucking lamp oil.

Just like no one wants to admit that we cause untold suffering to billions of cows and pigs every year in our factory farm matrix.

That's why we don't talk about animal intelligence and language the way that we should.

Galatians4_16• 2 years ago

Used to be they were just hunted to near extinction, for their oil. It has since been replaced with a more whale-friendly alternative.

"There are no solutions …only tradeoffs."

—Thomas Sowell

dotnet003• 2 years ago

The issue is that human language is visibly a tier above just "culturally defined communication". Lots of mammals have some sort of learned 'language' in that they associate sounds or actions with certain meanings, cats and dogs can even be taught to communicate with humans by pressing buttons that say human words.

However it's obvious that human language has much more complexity than just that. Barring undeniable and extraordinary evidence of communication of similar complexity to humans, the claim that cetaceans have language in the human sense remains extraordinary.

gweinberg• 2 years ago

Well, of course some people do want to call it language, but so far it's not clear that it is. We might say it's so complex it's more like a symphony than birdsong, but a symphony doesn't necessarily have anything like semantic content. Given the way whale songs evolve over time, with wanna-be whales imitating the cool whales, it's quite possible that it's pretty much all showing off their talents rather than communicating ideas.

NeuroCoder• 2 years ago

I can't speak for others, but when I've discussed the work of peers or even my own work I try to be very careful about not overstating the results. It's far too easy for a lay audience to take such comparisons and run amok.

As for your latter point, I doubt that most scientists studying animals are the ones against preventative measures in regards to extinction. There are plenty of ethical reasons to prevent extinction of a species without ascribing human characteristics.

dudinax• 2 years ago

What's worse, a lay audience that thinks whales are talking amongst themselves or a lay audience that has no idea whales do anything other than mating songs and sonar clicks?

JohnMakin5• 2 years ago

This is a nature article, not hard hitting scientific journalism - it is designed for a “lay audience” as you so condescendingly put it.

It’s accepted that there are unique “dialects” and cultural artifacts amongst different pods of orcas, for instance. They’ve been observed engaging in highly clever and coordinated attacks on prey (that can differ drastically depending on culture). It’s not really “running amok” to make a conclusion that they’re probably not coordinating and passing along cultural artifacts/hunting techniques by telepathy, but I do acknowledge that we don’t know everything.

hanniabu• 2 years ago

There's many that believe cats and dogs have no feelings. Until we can convince people if that, I have no hope of people caring about whales.

motohagiography2• 2 years ago

what categories of concepts would they express to each other? maybe an identifier and some conditions like depth, water temperature or pressure, maybe some magnetic or gravitational field direction and locations, tides, topography, mating, food, distress, and then probably some concept of boats and types of boats.

paulrudy2• 2 years ago

All of those options sound interesting and plausible, yet when I go for a walk while talking with a friend, I'm imagining an alien anthropologist wondering, "Are they communicating the ambient air temperature, and the availability of food nearby, their orientation to the sun and Venus setting?" Maybe the whales are gossiping, or sharing old stories, songs, jokes...

motohagiography2• 2 years ago

like the weather, restaurants, and plans for the summer, or even breeding opportunities? (will admit to missing the subtlety of the joke tho)

maybe they're complaining about how the options on whale tinder are too blubbery, but he categories for living things to talk about are definitely shared, and dividing phenomena into them is pretty straightforward. the real risk might be that the next iteration of GPT simulates an always just out of reach imagined better option and whales stop reproducing in pursuit of it. we should try it on another species first.

ralegh2• 2 years ago

Interspecies communication is a massively underrated field.

We've bridged human cultures in the past, which is easier because humans do similar (ish) things, we can use sight, touch, smell, etc to establish common ground.

We can communicate simple things with pets, though in my experience they learn from body language and intonation, understanding grammar and language feels like a step further.

What's the common ground with whales?

Like how eskimos have 100 words for snow, whales could have thousands of phrases for water, currents, temperature, storms. Fish, migration of different species. A language of relative position needed for pack hunting. They might tell stories about El Niño, earthquakes, tsunamis.

If they have social structure we may share ideas of relationships, friendship, giving (food), owing, sharing, helping, etc.

We might be able to correlate their speech with weather patterns and animal sightings. We could probably start a two way communication, I wonder if us or them would have better forecasts for sea conditions. They could act as a network of hundreds of thousands of sensors.

Sperm whales travel so far, that even without maps they might know the shape of the continents.

Very excited for the future.

asddubs• 2 years ago

From what I understand that 100 words for snow thing isn't really true, it's just that the language uses compound words like german, so it's just that an adjective + noun is rolled into one word (e.g. powder snow would also be pulverschnee in german, but it's really just the word for powder and snow without the space)

ralegh2• 2 years ago

Phrases, then.

pavlov• 2 years ago

Ok, so let’s say there are ten qualifiers and ten base words for snow. That makes 100 compound words.

It’s still substantially more snow-related vocabulary than in German, it seems to me.

FabHK2• 2 years ago

More than you ever wanted to know:

The snow words myth: progress at last - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/...

Bad science reporting again: the Eskimos are back - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419

"Words for snow" watch - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3497

The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax - https://web.archive.org/web/20181203001555/http://users.utu....

"Eskimo Words for Snow: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example" - https://www.jstor.org/stable/677570

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow

robocat• 2 years ago

A list of 65 English words/phrases for types of snow by a skier: https://skimo.co/words-for-snow but missing a few "spring snow", "Sierra cement".

yosito4• 2 years ago

Often people claim that Hungarian has over 50 words for "you" (https://dailymagyar.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05...)

But even the concept of what is a "word" in Hungarian is complex. Words have so many different forms depending on the context. As a Hungarian speaker, I perceive three forms of you (te, ön, maga) and one ending that is added to other words to to form a second person form of the word (-d), but even that is a complete oversimplification.

I don't think there is any reason why whale languages would have a concept of discreet words like we have in English.

IIAOPSW• 2 years ago

I like how you start out with "their experience is so alien how can we even expect to have words for their relevant concepts", and then proceed to list a bunch of words for their relevant concepts.

yosito4• 2 years ago

I can understand why scientists, linguists, and whale enthusiasts might be interested in understanding whale communication. But I have a much harder time imagining that whales have much to say to humans other than, "Please kindly fuck off" in 99% of cases.

circlefavshape• 2 years ago

I think finding out what they're saying about (rather than to) us would be amazing

thaumasiotes5• 2 years ago

Dogs have a lot to say to humans. Most of it also applies to whales:

"Feed me"

"I'm hurt, help me"

"I found the thing you wanted. How about a reward?"

If you can solve the whale's problems, then it will have things to say to you.

DizzyDoo• 2 years ago

For anyone wanting a short piece of fiction about human-animal communication development, I enjoyed this one (or part one of one) from Lars Doucet: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/we-trade-with-ants-a-short-s...

mrec• 2 years ago

For a blast from the past, Ursula Le Guin's The Author of the Acacia Seeds is also fun:

https://xenoflesh.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/u...

(Note: PDF)

frellus• 2 years ago

"Gracie is pregnant"

pegasus• 2 years ago

No mention of birdsong in this article leaves me hanging. Surely birdsong has got to be much more studied, and must contain lots of complexity ripe to be plumbed for hidden meaning.

BurningFrog• 2 years ago

AFAIK, pretty much all birdsong is telling other birds where you are and that either...

1. you want to mate!

2. you want others to stay away from your territory!

hnbad5• 2 years ago

IIRC there have been studies and they showed differences in the latter depending on the specific threat. But "birds" is a large group and studying "bird songs" is not any more helpful than studying "mammal noises" and I don't recall which species the study looked into.

It's worth remembering though that "language" is a form of communication and communication is vital in all social species. "Come here, I'm a good mate and available" and "Go away, I'm big and scary" are the lowest common denominator so even non-social species usually have some way of expressing those sentiments. But the more complex a species' social dynamics are, the more likely it is they will have means of communication capable of reflecting that.

It's also a mistake to look at utterances (mouth sounds) in isolation, especially when looking at a communication system we're unfamiliar with. Body language and facial expressions are a big deal in human communication even if we sometimes exclude them from analysis for simplicity. Not to mention that language features may be different if only because of the different biology (e.g. overtones, repetition or rhythm might carry semantics).

In other words, what Arrival did with alien "written language" equally applies to non-human "spoken language". It would be a mistake to assume that all the concepts we use for analyzing human language would apply to forms of communication in other animals even if another animal's language might turn out to be similarly complex.

thaumasiotes5• 2 years ago

https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/photoshop/6/0/1/150601.j...

hypertexthero• 2 years ago

Echoes Part II always makes me think of whales trying to talk to us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9Kts3fo98

utensil4778• 2 years ago

I'm really excited to see where ML takes us in cetacean linguistic research. I don't know if it will successfully translate whale song, but we'll learn a whole lot by trying.

Whale song is about the closest thing we have to an alien language. It's very much worth studying with all the tools we have.

Besides that, the 12 year old in me just screams look at the size of their brains! There has to be something going on in there. I really want to know what they have to say!

stubish2• 2 years ago

The smarter birds are easier to study. As are the great apes and dolphins. Research has been finding it isn't brain size so much as density and architecture of particular parts that leads to what we call 'intelligence', and I would assume what we could call a 'conversation'. Not that we shouldn't study whale songs, but that the scope is much larger than you indicated. We can communicate with gorillas with English words (but not English grammar last I heard?), but I'm not sure if we even know what noises and gestures gorillas make that are communication or are just them clearing their throats. But I've gone past studies working out the vocabularies of birds and meerkats.

jimwhite• 2 years ago

Here is the blog post from Project CETI that did the research

https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/sperm-whale-phonetic-...

Ridiculous how many articles repeat the NYT'$ paywalled headline but don't report any sources.

spopejoy• 2 years ago

Rhythm, tempo, rubato and ornamentation can be freely combined. This gives rise to a large inventory of distinguishable codas — a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” that makes it possible to systematically explain observed variability in coda structure.

It's remarkable how musical analysis is at the forefront here as a central categorizing schema.

There's remains a lot of mystery surrounding human neurology with respect to music, but it seems tha music travels different pathways than verbal communications, while still having "liguistic" features.

Music might even have vestigial function for us that birdsong and whalesong are still maintaining.

hiergiltdiestfu2• 2 years ago

Is this article's source available somewhere else, non-paywalled?

hiergiltdiestfu2• 2 years ago

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

xico• 2 years ago

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28802

engineer_22• 2 years ago

Do whales have dialects or is it a global language

Scientists Find an 'Alphabet' in Whale Songs

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