Cetacean conversation: AI could let us talk to whales. Experts question if that’s a good idea

Selling more than 125,000 copies, the 1970 album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” is the bestselling nature recording of all time. Including tracks such as “Distant Whale” and “Three Whale Trip,” the 35-minute series of recordings produced by bioacoustician Roger Payne was a historical landmark during the beginning of the Save The Whales campaign.

In an article published five days before Payne’s death last year, the lifelong activist asked readers to imagine what it might be like to talk to whales, writing, “If we could communicate with animals, ask them questions and receive answers — no matter how simple those questions and answers might turn out to be — the world might soon be moved enough to at least start the process of halting our runaway destruction of life.”

Now organizations like the Cetacean Translation Initiative, better known as Project CETI, are working to crack the whale code. The nonprofit organization is applying machine learning to understand communication between sperm whales, and received an initial $33 million in funding from the Audacious Project, an organization housed by TED conferences and funded by billionaires like Richard Branson and Ray Dalio. Scientists working for CETI include marine biologists, cryptographers, linguists, artificial intelligence experts and others. By observing sperm whales and matching the sounds they make with their behavior, researchers hope to discover common patterns and identify specific words. 

Instead of the more commonly known melodies popularized by “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” sperm whales communicate with sequences of clicks called codas. For example, a sperm whale might click three times during a coda, with a longer gap between the second and third click than the first and second, such as the first coda listed by Project CETI’s recent article published in Nature Communications last May.

There are 21 known codas used by whales in the Caribbean, but the paper found certain codas may be repeated at remarkably different tempos and rhythms, as well as with occasional “extra” clicks that appear in 4% of all audio recordings. The paper concludes that the variations in whale codas may imply that they are being combined into complex phrases, making it possible to create thousands of individual words similar to the way human diphthongs bring individual vowel sounds like o and u together to make a word like “cloud.” Researchers claim to have discovered two separate patterns they refer to as “coda vowels,” which are actively exchanged between whales as they communicate.

Although human and whale communication share some similarities in that sense, we still can’t talk to whales. But we may soon have a way around that, using artificial intelligence (AI).

By using AI to analyze and interpret the largest database of sperm whale recordings ever created, research teams at Project CETI plan to recreate coda sequences and then transmit them back into the wild. But like the way autofill on a cell phone can predict what you might be about to type next without actually understanding the context of your conversation, learning algorithms designed to predict sperm whale codas are only capable of completing patterns of information. Without understanding what these codas signify, researchers can’t actually know what they might be saying, if anything meaningful at all.

AI-generated codas might only confuse whales, and could potentially spread false information between cetacean species. Aza Raskin, CEO of the Earth Species Project, another nonprofit that researches animal communication, has shared fears of accidentally creating the equivalent of “whale QAnon” due to AI unknowingly stringing the wrong pattern of codas together. There are also concerns that AI mimicry could be used by unscrupulous humans to hunt and lure whales and other species to their doom.

But that’s assuming this technology can even work. Not all scientists are convinced the data shows whales communicate using actual language. Luke Rendell, lecturer in biology at the Sea Mammal Research Unit for the University of St. Andrews, questions the ability to translate the sounds made by sperm whales into human language.

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“The really critical thing about the way that humans use phonemes and sequences of phonemes is that it’s very hard to predict what the next one’s going to be,” Rendell told Salon during a video interview he conducted onboard a research vessel near the Scottish Isle of Eigg in the North Sea. While researchers at Project CETI may be identifying whale codas, Rendell doesn’t believe they are being combined together like human phonics. According to Rendell, the evidence shows whales are mainly repeating the same phoneme over and over again instead of actually combining varieties of phonemes into complex words.

“We don’t go, ‘puh puh puh,’” Rendell said, comparing the potential whale phonemes identified by Project CETI to the way humans speak. “We go, ‘Pyrex’ or ‘pirate.’”

Whether or not whales are actually speaking with one another, the fossil record shows that their ancestors evolved the ability to make sounds underwater tens of millions of years ago — long before human beings existed, let alone human language. The subjects being communicated by animals may be unlike anything humans might expect or comprehend, which the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once summed up by arguing, “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”

Although killer whales (which are not technically whales, but dolphins) have been taught to mimic basic words in English, scientists can lose track of the significance of animal behaviors by expecting them to share human points of view. According to Hal Whitehead, who has pioneered research on social organization and cultural transmission in deep-water whales since the 1970s, researchers began studying sperm whale codas by comparing them to Morse code.

“That was our initial thought — here we’ve got a Morse code-like system. So we started to look and see if we could relate specific codas to specific behaviors,” Whitehead told Salon. “The more we did that, we realized that wasn’t actually a very good model for what was going on.”

A small pod of sperm whale calves dive to swim under me and turn on their backs to look at us. (Getty Images/wildestanimal)Whitehead and his colleagues investigated the hypothesis that whales use language throughout decades of research, but never came up with clear results. “It didn’t turn out to look like a conversation. When you look at how it’s made, it looks like something very different. It looks more like a musical duet,” Whitehead said.

Cetacean species like whales and dolphins have been described musically throughout history. The Delphinus constellation is named for a Greek legend about a musician who played their instrument to summon a dolphin that saved them from pirates. A Dutch guide to marine life from the late 1500s claims that some whale species “like to hear music played on the lute, harp, flute and similar instruments.” An 1889 whaling travelogue recounts the sounds made by right whales and humpbacks note by note. “Beginning on F, the tone may rise to G, A, B and sometimes to C, before slanting back to F again. With the humpbacked whale the tone is much finer, often sounding like the E string of a violin.”

Jim Nollman is a conceptual artist and environmental activist passionate about playing music for animals, and claims the most notable reaction he’s ever received from orcas was in response to creating loops of guitar tracks inspired by James Brown songs. Nollman mainly plays slide guitar for whale species, but has worked with a wide range of other musicians, including a grammy-winning oboe player, violinists, percussionists, a chanting Tibetian lama and more.

“I always made it clear from the start that everyone listening got to decide for themselves whether the whales were in sync with us,” Nollman said, stoic on whether animals actually interact with his music, instead focusing on how playing with whales impacts the musician. “The Tibetan lama said the main thing the orcas can teach us is how to breathe. They do this special kind of breathing that takes years to learn in the monasteries, but they just do it naturally,” he continued. “No AI guy is going to know that — unless he’s from Tibet.”

David Rothenberg is one of the musicians who has performed for whales alongside Nollman, and believes making interspecies music is more of an exercise in empathy than an attempt to find specific definitions of sounds. “We can learn what it’s like to be all kinds of other animals by really sharing in their world of communication. That’s why I play music with them — to get a sense of what it might be like to be them,” Rothenberg explained.

Musicians like Rothenberg are interested in understanding how differences in animal perception create their own unique forms of communication. Umwelt is a German term describing the perspective of an organism based on its sensory abilities, environment and anything else that contributes to its overall consciousness — the way fish must perceive water much differently than birds or how a bumblebee can see ultraviolet light but we can’t.

Sperm whales rely on echolocation to sense their surroundings, and can only see around 35 feet (10.7 meters) ahead of themselves in most water. To get around this, when communicating between members of their own species they sometimes use extremely loud omnidirectional blasts of sound, emitting noise in all directions at once. Sometimes called a sperm whale’s “gunshot,” these sounds are the loudest made by any animal — over 200 decibels, or roughly the equivalent of a Saturn IV rocket blasting off, and loud enough to burst human eardrums and potentially kill someone, though neither deafening or death has been documented. This technique allows sperm whales to sense each other from over one thousand miles away.

“These codas were more about bonding,” Whitehead said, when asked what kinds of messages sperm whales might be sending to one another. “The basic information was, ‘we are really good buddies,’ and, ‘you can depend on me, and I can depend on you.’”

Artificial intelligence may be perfect for analyzing every aspect of codas except for the emotional bonds they signify between individuals. AI can find correlations between audio, video, chemical analysis, or any other kind of measurements that may create a sperm whale’s umwelt, which Whitehead agreed can be expected to lead to exciting new discoveries. But using AI as a specific translation tool between whales and humans remains a questionable goal for many marine biologists. Even if sperm whale codas can’t be decoded, however, that doesn’t mean they can’t be better understood.

Sperm whales derive their name from the waxy, liquid substance produced in their skulls by a massive biological structure called the spermaceti organ. This melon-like organ takes up most of the animal’s head, making communication possible by acting like a form of sonar. But the spermaceti is full of goo resembling the pearly hue of human sperm, and possesses oily properties that once led humans to hunt them to the brink of extinction. Whale oil was legally sold in the U.S. until 1972, and could be used for anything from gun lubricant to transmission fluid. Considering centuries of whaling, suffocating amounts of plastic garbage, and sound pollution from shipping traffic, what would be most surprising is if whales felt like speaking with humans at all.

Whale populations have dramatically rebounded since the 1986 global moratorium on whaling, despite the many hazards that remain for cetacean species. In the time since the beginning of the Save the Whales campaign, the number of humpbacks in the Indian Ocean has grown from 600 to over 36,000. Maybe humpbacks have helped themselves by making music catchy enough for humans to sell on records. Though such an influence isn’t quantifiable, activists agree whale songs have been a major inspiration for the campaigns and legislation that led to international legal protections for whales today. Although this increase in whale populations is encouraging for conservationists, laws alone aren’t enough to protect the species long-term.

From where he continues research in the North Sea, Luke Rendell stated the obvious: “There’s nothing that they could tell us about what they need that we don’t really already know, which is to stop hunting them, stop catching them in our nets, stop polluting their environments, and try and just leave them alone for a little bit,” Rendell said. “I don’t think we need an AI translation tool to know that’s what the animals would probably ask for if they could.”