
The study of acoustic signals and the supposed spoken language of the dolphins - darrhiggs
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405722316301177
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hprotagonist
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.

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imglorp
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.

~~~
astrodust
Crazy idea: Crowdsource it.

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

~~~
daeken
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.

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taneq
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.

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lawpoop
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.

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

