cetalingua

Humpback also have spindle (mirror) neurons in their brains, those are thought to be related to cooperation, empathy, etc. Humans have them too, but not many other species (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127111607.h...).

It is good to not anthropomorphise, but we really should finally move away from Descartes' view on animals being simple automatons.

The burst pulse is extremely complex, some can have 400 single clicks in one pulse (our ear cannot even hear these single pulses, they merge and for our human ear it sounds like a creaky door), and the pulse duration is like a few seconds. Each click is broadband (can go up to 100 kHz and beyond), it is frequency modulated with varied peak frequencies, center frequencies, RMS, some clicks can have 2 peaks, etc. It is super fast and super complex, we we cannot just generate one, only dolphin's sound producing mechanism can.

It is not active yet, it will be in a month or so. You can also sign up for our newsletter here: cetalingua.com , we will send notification when this project goes live.

http://oceanwildthings.com/2018/06/what-humpback-whales-can-...

They also have mirror neurons that have been an important component in theory of mind.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127111607.h...

"Deep Thinkers" is a good recent book, you can check it out (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27...)

>Given our depth in knowledge in acoustics, I'm hoping you can expand a little on this

Our challenge is that we are visual species who are trying to understand “acoustic” species. (see ”What it is like to be a bat? https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum...) Yes, we can describe their vocalizations in terms of peak frequencies, RMS, center frequencies, duration, intensity, inter-click-intervals for burst pulses or sperm whale codas, but what does it all mean? The biggest struggle is not even that, but how to conceptualize their communication system. Naturally, being humans, we want it to have semantics, grammar, pragmatics and phonetics, and if it does not, they must be dumb (i.e. Chomsky’s argument). So we search for the smallest unit (a phoneme) and naturally we cannot find it.

Additionally, we know that dolphins have at least 2 sound generators (and possibly up to 4) that could work simultaneously and independently, potentially producing very complex utterances. On top of that, we have an animal that “sees” the world through sound, it must have at least some contribution to how the communication system is set up. The conventional belief as of now is that echolocation is separate from communication, although Dr. John Lilly was convinced that dolphins could use echolocation to describe things in their environment (to be clear, we have no scientific support for this hypothesis).

That is why describing dolphin whistles and other sounds terms of duration, peak frequencies, infliction points, etc., does not help at all, as it does not help us to understand how the communication system is set up and what this whistle actually means (and why is it used). The only positive thing in all that is that there must be some sort of communication system. If you ever encounter a pod (especially the offshore species) you would be amazed at their constant chat. So much energy is spent on all these utterances they must be important and must have at least some meaning.