8 ms·

Researchers have identified new elements of whale vocalizations

127 points by manicennui 3y ago

ars 3y ago
As usual with these kinds of things the title doesn't match the article. There is no breakthrough in understanding. Instead they identified a thing in the sound that changes. They do not understand what it means, they just see it. It could be something, or nothing, or just music.
- toss1 3y ago
  Indeed, they don't yet understand meaning. But a new understanding of the components of the code and their relationships is certainly a breakthrough towards that understanding. Yes, the headline had me hoping that there was some full understanding (it'd be nice to broadcast to the Orcas off Spain & Gibralter to please not attack the boats), but I can't say that it's clickbait-level.
  - tspike 3y ago
    After harvesting the ozone layer using airships that produce eardrum-splitting noise for decades, the aliens achieved a communication breakthrough and were finally able to communicate to the pesky humans: “Please stop attacking our airships. They are very convenient for us.”
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  Perhaps, but the scientists involved went from "whale songs are like groans" to "whale songs are like talking". The 'breakthrough' they were describing is that visibility into a complex, and repeatable, substructure to the songs shows that those songs could contain more complex "words." If you have ever tried to communicate by groaning only (which an acquaintance of mine was forced to do while recovering in the ICU once) there are very limited things you can say, and it often reduces to you asking questions and them producing a "yes" groan, or a "no" groan. They can't 'tell' you a whole lot. As a result of their research they are getting closer to the underlying structure (which others will look for in other species of whales) and with that they may be able create situations where they could start testing the concepts that might be in that structure. That sounds kind of breakthroughish to me :-)
  - sinkasapa 3y ago
    Having read the article. I don't know where one would get the idea that it said anything meaningful about the songs being like "talking", which implies a whole host of features that were not even mentioned. They made analogies with human language phenomena such as suprasegmental features but really this was about there being newly discovered patterns in the sounds. These were not correlated to any specific meaning or purpose. We need those if one is going to talk about the whale song as a communicative system at all, much less a language. With reference to something like Hockett's design features, we have a modality, but despite the existence of a pattern, we don't even know if there is discreteness, necessarily. It is kind of like how children will be taught about atoms and think about the solar system. The analogy may be meaningful or not. The article relies on the readiness of the reader to anthropomorphize the noises made by the animals and misleads them.
    - ChuckMcM 3y ago
      This from the paper's abstract: Finally, we control for whale movement and present several pieces of evidence suggesting that the observed patterns are not artifacts, but are actively controlled by sperm whales. We also show that the two coda vowels (the a-vowel and i-vowel) are actively exchanged by sperm whales in dialogues. The uncovered spectral properties suggest that codas are highly compositional, more informative, and more complex than previously thought. This from the article: “If our findings are correct, it means that the communication of sperm whales is much more complex and can carry more information than previously thought,” the researchers concluded. The researchers here make two observations, the whales intentionally use specific forms in their songs and the specific forms are sequenced differently but intentionally. For biologists this is significant because it differs from a common form of "singing" or "calls" that each have a specific meaning but they are not internally variegated like these calls are. What the researchers propose (or hypothesize) is that this intentional and varied voicing within a "song" suggests the whales are exchanging much more detailed information than "threat" or "help" or "food here" etc.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Morse?
- pjungwir 3y ago
  Impertinent question: why not ask ChatGPT to talk with them? It doesn't have understanding either. I think this would be a great experiment in the meaning of consciousness. Can we train an LLM to communicate with whales, birds, etc.?
  - nequo 3y ago
    It’s being done right now: https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/ https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/ One difficulty is that there isn’t nearly as much whale chatter available for training data as there’s human chatter. And one important question is, why is this useful if we don’t know what the LLM says to them? But the post above touches on that too.
    - rnk 3y ago
      Won't they need some documents that combine whale speech noises with human words to bridge the gap? Otherwise they are making comments that are just word-like or sound-like fragments.
      - MPSimmons 3y ago
        If you had enough recordings, you could (I think) build weights based _solely_ on whale speech. Humans wouldn't be able to understand the weights, and the word vectors in that model wouldn't match the word vectors in an English model, but I suppose there's a chance that vectors might be similar? I don't know. I think you'd have to be very good at both linguistics and also AI to know.
      - arcastroe 3y ago
        I don't think this is strictly needed. An English dictionary may seem pointless because it defines every word using only other English words. But the meaning is contained in the _relationship_ between the words. I'm sure you've seen the example of word vectors that captures some of this meaning. king - man + woman = queen In Spanish, rey - hombre + mujer = reina The _relationship_ between "king" and "queen" in English may look close enough to the _relationship_ between "rey" and "reina" in Spanish, allowing you to bridge the gap between the two languages, even if they are entirely disconnected and you've never seen a direct translation between them.
- andrew_ 3y ago
  Let them cook. That's how many scientific breakthroughs begin.
- jdmichal 3y ago
  They identified a thing that changes, but in a consistent way across the sample population. That's a very important distinction, because synchronizing vocalizations is not easy. Humans spend a long time learning it. And failure to do it "correctly" can be everything from an accent to a speech pathology, depending on how "wrong" it is. (Scare quotes purely because the definition of right and wrong changes over space and time.)
nogridbag 3y ago
Sometimes I'm not if I have malware installed or if this is just the state of the web right now: https://imgur.com/a/wzb8fAT https://imgur.com/a/wzb8fAT
- neom 3y ago
  I can't imagine browsing sites without an adblocker.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    Sounds like a good statatement to print on t-shirts.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      Ads Are For Suckers reads more succinctly. (And no offense to OP.)
      - nogridbag 3y ago
        No offense taken. Unlike my childhood where I used to navigate via webrings and questionable search engines, these days I rarely visit anything but HN links. So I haven't had much of a need for an ad blocker. Occasionally I'm surprised links like these get to the front page, even with all the ads and horrible UX. I must admit, I too wanted to believe so badly we can communicate with whales, that I managed to scroll down to see the first paragraph below the fold. But quickly closed it shortly after to read the HN comments.
        JKCalhoun 3y ago
        Yeah, it is too bad this crap is the new normal for web sites. It saddens me that Gen Y (or what have you) never knew an internet before it became a marketing landscape.
    - neilv 3y ago
      Related: there's a snazzy uBlock Origin logo T-shirt for sale online, but I won't link it right now, because unclear whether it's approved by Raymond Hill, and I don't see a mention of what the proceeds support.
jablongo 3y ago
Here is a bad dramatization, er "extrapolation", starring Meryl Streep, of where this could lead if we ever do gain real understanding of whalespeak. https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/2046-whale-fall/umc.cmc.2gda86hw4npz5dxuviq3evisp?showId=umc.cmc.4uoqxmxlnipm9zsc88bkjyjx4 https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/2046-whale-fall/umc.cmc.2gda...
1970-01-01 3y ago
Great news! Now Kirk and crew don't need to slingshot around the sun and go back in time to save the Earth.
- andrew_ 3y ago
  Proof we're on a separate timeline right there. Slightly bummed tho I must admit.
  - rainbowzootsuit 3y ago
    This knowledge was likely lost during the Eugenics wars, so the time continuum is safe for now.
    - daveslash 3y ago
      This knowledge applies to Sperm Whales. The space probe was specifically looking for Humpback Whales. The continuum is doubly safe for now.
- beirut_bootleg 3y ago
  And we can now translate their warnings about the incoming extinction level CME and save Atlantis. These are exciting times
  - isodev 3y ago
    While reading the post, I kept thinking how would it sound to pronounce “Adaris” using whale a-vowels and i-vowels.
moffkalast 3y ago
Whale done!
- happytiger 3y ago
  With porpoise!
  - teamonkey 3y ago
    Felicetaceans!
sshrajesh 3y ago
Can't we use an AI model to decipher different animal noises and correlate to what it could mean?
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Sounds like they took the first step.
- mobeets 3y ago
  There is a big effort to do that actually, called Project CETI: https://www.projectceti.org/ https://www.projectceti.org/
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    If nothing else it has a fantastic name
  - krisoft 3y ago
    Yes. And this result is comming from that project. Gašper Beguš who is the linguistics lead of Project CETI is the first author of the paper this article talks about.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  I’m not sure how you would go about attributing meaning to the sounds. Usually you need labels for that sort of thing. With current techniques we might be able to predict which sounds come next, but we still wouldn’t know what they meant.
Cenk 3y ago
Link to paper: https://oa.mg/work/10.31219/osf.io/285cs https://oa.mg/work/10.31219/osf.io/285cs
RajT88 3y ago
Just for fun some years ago, I wrote an Onion-style satire article about, "Whale language decoded; actually a cipher for Spanish". The gist was a lot of the researchers with names like Jones and Smith were disappointed. And the one guy on the research team with a Spanish last name was getting a lot of weird comments about it which made him uncomfortable. 75% of the whale song was decoded to just mean, "Oy mira! Camaron!" Dolphins were discovered to be speaking a cipher for English, but with a Chicano accent. Some of my friends found it funny, others didn't get it. --- I'm really interested to hear what they're actually talking about!
amai 3y ago
Could a multimodal LLM finetuned on whale sounds be used to translate whale language to human language?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- peddling-brink 3y ago
  Only if it was trained on a corpus of existing translations. Just training on existing sounds might give us a whale sound generator. But it would be the equivalent of Prisencolinensinainciusol: https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8
  - andrewla 3y ago
    Not necessarily -- the embedding into semantic space is largely unsupervised; LLMs do not learn to translate through explicit examples of parallel text. Largely it's just a matter of having a large enough corpus of whale speech in a format that can be encoded into a token sequence.
    - peddling-brink 3y ago
      There must be a underlying commonality for that to be possible. What would a whale call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
    - indigo945 3y ago
      > LLMs do not learn to translate through explicit examples of parallel text. Of course they do, lots of that is in the training data.
      - andrewla 3y ago
        For general-purpose LLMs, there is no indication given during training that texts are parallel -- while there are parallel texts in the training data, the model is not trained on generating one text from another. That is, it does not get any feedback during training about translation, only prediction in the current token stream, not parallel ones. There are several completely unsupervised language translation systems that predate LLMs, but the performance is middling. For LLMs the translation behavior is largely an emergent property that is not completely understood; if we can tokenize whale language in a useful way, it is entirely possible that the LLM can derive a weak or approximate translation of some of the language structure.
kneel 3y ago
Apparently whales have been doing podcasts for a while now
unsupp0rted 3y ago
> The researchers explain in their paper, published as a preprint online this week, that the first clue that so-called spectral properties could be meaningful for whale speech was provided by AI. > Not only did the AI predict elements of whale vocalizations already thought to be meaningful, such as clicks, but it also singled out acoustic properties.
patall 3y ago
Hakai magazine had an interesting article/podcast episode about the project a while ago: https://hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-chatting-with-whales/ https://hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-ch...
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38541217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38541217 - Dec 2023 (29 comments)
taimurkazmi 3y ago
Spark notes... Scientists studied how sperm whales communicate underwater. They found that whale clicks have similarities to human vowels and diphthongs. An AI model helped by imitating whale sounds, providing useful information. The researchers discovered specific patterns in whale vocalizations, like unique "coda vowels." Whales seem to control the frequency of their calls, making their communication more complex than we thought. No, we can't have a casual conversation with whales yet. Serious ones either.

127 points by manicennui 3y ago

ars 3y ago

As usual with these kinds of things the title doesn't match the article. There is no breakthrough in understanding. Instead they identified a thing in the sound that changes. They do not understand what it means, they just see it. It could be something, or nothing, or just music.

toss1 3y ago
Indeed, they don't yet understand meaning. But a new understanding of the components of the code and their relationships is certainly a breakthrough towards that understanding. Yes, the headline had me hoping that there was some full understanding (it'd be nice to broadcast to the Orcas off Spain & Gibralter to please not attack the boats), but I can't say that it's clickbait-level.
- tspike 3y ago
  After harvesting the ozone layer using airships that produce eardrum-splitting noise for decades, the aliens achieved a communication breakthrough and were finally able to communicate to the pesky humans: “Please stop attacking our airships. They are very convenient for us.”
ChuckMcM 3y ago
Perhaps, but the scientists involved went from "whale songs are like groans" to "whale songs are like talking". The 'breakthrough' they were describing is that visibility into a complex, and repeatable, substructure to the songs shows that those songs could contain more complex "words." If you have ever tried to communicate by groaning only (which an acquaintance of mine was forced to do while recovering in the ICU once) there are very limited things you can say, and it often reduces to you asking questions and them producing a "yes" groan, or a "no" groan. They can't 'tell' you a whole lot. As a result of their research they are getting closer to the underlying structure (which others will look for in other species of whales) and with that they may be able create situations where they could start testing the concepts that might be in that structure. That sounds kind of breakthroughish to me :-)
- sinkasapa 3y ago
  Having read the article. I don't know where one would get the idea that it said anything meaningful about the songs being like "talking", which implies a whole host of features that were not even mentioned. They made analogies with human language phenomena such as suprasegmental features but really this was about there being newly discovered patterns in the sounds. These were not correlated to any specific meaning or purpose. We need those if one is going to talk about the whale song as a communicative system at all, much less a language. With reference to something like Hockett's design features, we have a modality, but despite the existence of a pattern, we don't even know if there is discreteness, necessarily. It is kind of like how children will be taught about atoms and think about the solar system. The analogy may be meaningful or not. The article relies on the readiness of the reader to anthropomorphize the noises made by the animals and misleads them.
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
    This from the paper's abstract: Finally, we control for whale movement and present several pieces of evidence suggesting that the observed patterns are not artifacts, but are actively controlled by sperm whales. We also show that the two coda vowels (the a-vowel and i-vowel) are actively exchanged by sperm whales in dialogues. The uncovered spectral properties suggest that codas are highly compositional, more informative, and more complex than previously thought. This from the article: “If our findings are correct, it means that the communication of sperm whales is much more complex and can carry more information than previously thought,” the researchers concluded. The researchers here make two observations, the whales intentionally use specific forms in their songs and the specific forms are sequenced differently but intentionally. For biologists this is significant because it differs from a common form of "singing" or "calls" that each have a specific meaning but they are not internally variegated like these calls are. What the researchers propose (or hypothesize) is that this intentional and varied voicing within a "song" suggests the whales are exchanging much more detailed information than "threat" or "help" or "food here" etc.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Morse?
pjungwir 3y ago
Impertinent question: why not ask ChatGPT to talk with them? It doesn't have understanding either. I think this would be a great experiment in the meaning of consciousness. Can we train an LLM to communicate with whales, birds, etc.?
- nequo 3y ago
  It’s being done right now: https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/ https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/ One difficulty is that there isn’t nearly as much whale chatter available for training data as there’s human chatter. And one important question is, why is this useful if we don’t know what the LLM says to them? But the post above touches on that too.
  - rnk 3y ago
    Won't they need some documents that combine whale speech noises with human words to bridge the gap? Otherwise they are making comments that are just word-like or sound-like fragments.
    - MPSimmons 3y ago
      If you had enough recordings, you could (I think) build weights based _solely_ on whale speech. Humans wouldn't be able to understand the weights, and the word vectors in that model wouldn't match the word vectors in an English model, but I suppose there's a chance that vectors might be similar? I don't know. I think you'd have to be very good at both linguistics and also AI to know.
    - arcastroe 3y ago
      I don't think this is strictly needed. An English dictionary may seem pointless because it defines every word using only other English words. But the meaning is contained in the _relationship_ between the words. I'm sure you've seen the example of word vectors that captures some of this meaning. king - man + woman = queen In Spanish, rey - hombre + mujer = reina The _relationship_ between "king" and "queen" in English may look close enough to the _relationship_ between "rey" and "reina" in Spanish, allowing you to bridge the gap between the two languages, even if they are entirely disconnected and you've never seen a direct translation between them.
andrew_ 3y ago
Let them cook. That's how many scientific breakthroughs begin.
jdmichal 3y ago
They identified a thing that changes, but in a consistent way across the sample population. That's a very important distinction, because synchronizing vocalizations is not easy. Humans spend a long time learning it. And failure to do it "correctly" can be everything from an accent to a speech pathology, depending on how "wrong" it is. (Scare quotes purely because the definition of right and wrong changes over space and time.)

nogridbag 3y ago

Sometimes I'm not if I have malware installed or if this is just the state of the web right now: https://imgur.com/a/wzb8fAT https://imgur.com/a/wzb8fAT

neom 3y ago
I can't imagine browsing sites without an adblocker.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Sounds like a good statatement to print on t-shirts.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Ads Are For Suckers reads more succinctly. (And no offense to OP.)
    - nogridbag 3y ago
      No offense taken. Unlike my childhood where I used to navigate via webrings and questionable search engines, these days I rarely visit anything but HN links. So I haven't had much of a need for an ad blocker. Occasionally I'm surprised links like these get to the front page, even with all the ads and horrible UX. I must admit, I too wanted to believe so badly we can communicate with whales, that I managed to scroll down to see the first paragraph below the fold. But quickly closed it shortly after to read the HN comments.
      - JKCalhoun 3y ago
        Yeah, it is too bad this crap is the new normal for web sites. It saddens me that Gen Y (or what have you) never knew an internet before it became a marketing landscape.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Related: there's a snazzy uBlock Origin logo T-shirt for sale online, but I won't link it right now, because unclear whether it's approved by Raymond Hill, and I don't see a mention of what the proceeds support.

jablongo 3y ago

Here is a bad dramatization, er "extrapolation", starring Meryl Streep, of where this could lead if we ever do gain real understanding of whalespeak. https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/2046-whale-fall/umc.cmc.2gda86hw4npz5dxuviq3evisp?showId=umc.cmc.4uoqxmxlnipm9zsc88bkjyjx4 https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/2046-whale-fall/umc.cmc.2gda...

1970-01-01 3y ago

Great news! Now Kirk and crew don't need to slingshot around the sun and go back in time to save the Earth.

andrew_ 3y ago
Proof we're on a separate timeline right there. Slightly bummed tho I must admit.
- rainbowzootsuit 3y ago
  This knowledge was likely lost during the Eugenics wars, so the time continuum is safe for now.
  - daveslash 3y ago
    This knowledge applies to Sperm Whales. The space probe was specifically looking for Humpback Whales. The continuum is doubly safe for now.
beirut_bootleg 3y ago
And we can now translate their warnings about the incoming extinction level CME and save Atlantis. These are exciting times
- isodev 3y ago
  While reading the post, I kept thinking how would it sound to pronounce “Adaris” using whale a-vowels and i-vowels.

moffkalast 3y ago

Whale done!

happytiger 3y ago
With porpoise!
- teamonkey 3y ago
  Felicetaceans!

sshrajesh 3y ago

Can't we use an AI model to decipher different animal noises and correlate to what it could mean?

JKCalhoun 3y ago
Sounds like they took the first step.
mobeets 3y ago
There is a big effort to do that actually, called Project CETI: https://www.projectceti.org/ https://www.projectceti.org/
- bee_rider 3y ago
  If nothing else it has a fantastic name
- krisoft 3y ago
  Yes. And this result is comming from that project. Gašper Beguš who is the linguistics lead of Project CETI is the first author of the paper this article talks about.
janalsncm 3y ago
I’m not sure how you would go about attributing meaning to the sounds. Usually you need labels for that sort of thing. With current techniques we might be able to predict which sounds come next, but we still wouldn’t know what they meant.

Cenk 3y ago

Link to paper: https://oa.mg/work/10.31219/osf.io/285cs https://oa.mg/work/10.31219/osf.io/285cs

RajT88 3y ago

Just for fun some years ago, I wrote an Onion-style satire article about, "Whale language decoded; actually a cipher for Spanish". The gist was a lot of the researchers with names like Jones and Smith were disappointed. And the one guy on the research team with a Spanish last name was getting a lot of weird comments about it which made him uncomfortable. 75% of the whale song was decoded to just mean, "Oy mira! Camaron!" Dolphins were discovered to be speaking a cipher for English, but with a Chicano accent. Some of my friends found it funny, others didn't get it. --- I'm really interested to hear what they're actually talking about!

amai 3y ago

Could a multimodal LLM finetuned on whale sounds be used to translate whale language to human language?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
peddling-brink 3y ago
Only if it was trained on a corpus of existing translations. Just training on existing sounds might give us a whale sound generator. But it would be the equivalent of Prisencolinensinainciusol: https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8
- andrewla 3y ago
  Not necessarily -- the embedding into semantic space is largely unsupervised; LLMs do not learn to translate through explicit examples of parallel text. Largely it's just a matter of having a large enough corpus of whale speech in a format that can be encoded into a token sequence.
  - peddling-brink 3y ago
    There must be a underlying commonality for that to be possible. What would a whale call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
  - indigo945 3y ago
    > LLMs do not learn to translate through explicit examples of parallel text. Of course they do, lots of that is in the training data.
    - andrewla 3y ago
      For general-purpose LLMs, there is no indication given during training that texts are parallel -- while there are parallel texts in the training data, the model is not trained on generating one text from another. That is, it does not get any feedback during training about translation, only prediction in the current token stream, not parallel ones. There are several completely unsupervised language translation systems that predate LLMs, but the performance is middling. For LLMs the translation behavior is largely an emergent property that is not completely understood; if we can tokenize whale language in a useful way, it is entirely possible that the LLM can derive a weak or approximate translation of some of the language structure.

kneel 3y ago

Apparently whales have been doing podcasts for a while now

unsupp0rted 3y ago

> The researchers explain in their paper, published as a preprint online this week, that the first clue that so-called spectral properties could be meaningful for whale speech was provided by AI. > Not only did the AI predict elements of whale vocalizations already thought to be meaningful, such as clicks, but it also singled out acoustic properties.

patall 3y ago

Hakai magazine had an interesting article/podcast episode about the project a while ago: https://hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-chatting-with-whales/ https://hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-ch...

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38541217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38541217 - Dec 2023 (29 comments)

taimurkazmi 3y ago

Spark notes... Scientists studied how sperm whales communicate underwater. They found that whale clicks have similarities to human vowels and diphthongs. An AI model helped by imitating whale sounds, providing useful information. The researchers discovered specific patterns in whale vocalizations, like unique "coda vowels." Whales seem to control the frequency of their calls, making their communication more complex than we thought. No, we can't have a casual conversation with whales yet. Serious ones either.