Proposed whale vowel patternsAbstract
The sperm whale communication system, consisting of groups of clicks called codas, has been primarily analyzed in terms of the number of clicks and their inter-click timing. This paper reports spectral properties in sperm whale vocalizations and demonstrates that spectral properties are highly structured, discretely distributed across codas, and uttered in dialogues, rather than being a physical artefact of whale movement. We report formant structure in whale codas and uncover previously unobserved spectral patterns. We argue that these spectral properties freely combine with the traditionally analyzed properties. We present a visualization technique that allows the description of several previously unobserved patterns. Codas are on many levels analogous to human vowels and diphthongs and can be conceptualized in terms of the source-filter theory: vowel duration and pitch correspond to the number of clicks and their timing (traditional coda types), while spectral properties of clicks correspond to formants in human vowels. We identify two recurrent and discrete coda-level spectral patterns that appear across individual sperm whales and across traditional coda types: the a- and i-coda vowels. We also report that sperm whales have diphthongal patterns on individual codas: with rising, falling, rising-falling and falling-rising formant patterns observed. These uncovered patterns suggest that spectral properties have the potential to add to the communicative complexity of codas independent of the traditionally analyzed properties and add a new dimension to the study of a cetacean communication system.
This paper follows up on predictions obtained from generative models in Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference and uncovers patterns corresponding to vowels and dipthongs in the communication of sperm whales.
The work has received significant attention, with more than 1.7 million impressions on X:
Sperm whales have equivalents to human vowels.
— Gašper Beguš (@begusgasper) December 5, 2023
We uncovered spectral properties in whales’ clicks that are recurrent across whales, independent of traditional types, and compositional.
We got clues to look into spectral properties from our AI interpretability technique CDEV. pic.twitter.com/8sEAzPkMfo
and coverage in media outlets (some collected in this Medium post).
