[CLIP: Bird songs]
Kelso Harper: Ever wondered what songbirds are actually talking to each other with their calls?
Sophie Bushwick: Or what could be your cat meowing early in the morning?
[CLIP: Cat meowing]
Harper: Powerful new technologies are helping researchers decipher animal communications. And even start talking to non-humans.
Bushwick: With advanced sensors and artificial intelligence, we may be on the brink of interspecies communication.
[CLIP: Show theme music]
Harper: Today we talk about how scientists are beginning to communicate with creatures such as bats and bees, and how these conversations are making us rethink our relationships with other species. My name is Kelso Harper, multimedia editor. Scientific American.
Bushwick: Sophie Bushwick, technical editor.
Harper: you are listening science, quickHey Sophie.
Bushwick: Hello Kelso.
Harper: You recently chatted with the author of the new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing our Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.
Bushwick: Well, I had a great conversation with Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her book explores how researchers are also using new technologies to understand animal communication in the burgeoning field of digital bioacoustics.
Harper: Digital bioacoustics. teeth. So what does it actually look like? Are you trying to make an animal talk like a human using translation collars like in the movies? Up?
[CLIP: From Walt Disney’s Up]
Dog Doug: My name is Doug. My master made me this caller so I could talk to the squirrels.
Bushwick: While not perfect, this is similar to how researchers began trying to communicate with animals in the 70s and 80s, trying to teach them human language. However, many scientists today would like to move away from this human-centric approach and instead understand animal communication in its own terms.
Harper: So instead of trying to teach the birds to speak English, we’re deciphering what the birds are already talking to each other with Birdish or Birdies.
Bushwick: Yes, exactly. This emerging field of digital bioacoustics uses portable field recorders like mini-mics that can be placed anywhere, such as in trees, on mountain peaks, on the backs of whales and birds.
They record sounds 24/7 and create tons of data. That’s where artificial intelligence comes in. Researchers can apply natural language processing algorithms like those used by Google Translate to detect patterns in these recordings and begin deciphering what the animals are saying. each other.
Harper: Wow it’s wild. So what have scientists learned so far?
Bushwick: One of the examples Karen gives in her book is about flying foxes in Egypt. A researcher named Yossi Yovel said that over the course of two and a half months he recorded audio and video of nearly 20 bats. His team adapted a speech recognition program so that he analyzed 15,000 sounds, and the algorithm mapped certain sounds to specific social interactions in the video (such as fighting over food or scrambled for a sleeping position). Associated.
Therefore, this study, in combination with other related studies, revealed that bats are capable of complex communication.
Harper: All I remember being taught was that bats make high-pitched echolocation sounds when they fly around, but there seems to be more to it than that.
Bushwick: Yes definitely. It turns out that bats have something called signature calls that behave like individual names.
Harper: Wow.
Bushwick: And they distinguish between genders when communicating with each other.
Harper: what?
Bushwick: They have dialects. They argue about food and sleeping positions. They socially distance themselves when sick.
Harper: are you serious?
Bushwick: yes. They are better than us in some ways. One of the coolest things about her is that the bat mother uses her own version of mother for her child.
So when humans talk to cute babies, they use their mother tongue.we pitch up oh what a cute sweet potatoBats also use a special tone to talk to children, but lower their pitch instead…oh what a cute sweet potato.
This may help bat babies to chatter and learn specific words and denoting sounds in the same way that native human babies acquire language.
Harper: It’s ridiculous. Or I don’t know. Is it…? Do you think it’s because I’m trapped in the idea that humans are somehow quite different from other animals, I don’t know, but have uniquely sophisticated ways of communicating? Are you learning that you may not be as special as you thought?
Bushwick: I agree. The work also raises many important philosophical and ethical questions. For a long time, philosophers said we would never be able to determine whether animals could be said to have language, much less whether they could decipher it or speak. It changed the game.
One of the things Karen said during the interview is that you can’t talk to bats, but computers can.
You and I cannot hear, let alone keep up with the high-speed, high-pitched communication between bats. And while we certainly can’t speak for it ourselves, electronic sensors and speakers can.
And with artificial intelligence, we can start tracking animal communication patterns that were previously impossible.
Whether it can be called an animal language is still debated, but it is becoming clear that animals have much more complex ways of communicating than previously thought.
Harper: Apparently. What other examples are there in this book?
Bushwick: Karen also told me the story of a bee researcher named Tim Landgraf. That is, bees’ communication is very different from ours. Speak not only with sound, but also with body movements. Have you heard about the famous waggle dance?
Harper: yes. A place where bees shake their hairy little buttocks in different directions? Or describe where to find nectar?
Bushwick: That’s it. But the waggle dance is just one of his forms of bee communication. Landgraf and his team used a combination of natural language processing. A computer that analyzes bat studies and images, like his vision, deciphers both the sounds and vibrations of bee chatter. You can now track individual bees and predict the impact of one bee on another.
Harper: That’s very cool.
Bushwick: Yeah, they have all sorts of specific signals that researchers have given these funny names. [CLIP: Bee toot sound] and phony [CLIP: Bee quack sound] because they make a whooshing sound that warns of danger [CLIP: Bee whooping sound]. Flock-related plumbing signals [CLIP: Bee piping sound]and they use hashes or stop signals to quiet hive [CLIP: Bee hush sound].
Harper: oh. I love paintings of buzzing bees.
Bushwick: Landgraf’s next step was to code what they learned into robotic bees.
Harper: Classic.
Bushwick: After 7-8 prototypes, we had a robo-bee that actually entered the hive and issued commands such as a stop signal that the bees obeyed.
Harper: That’s a banana. One step closer to the world of science-based B-movies.
Bushwick: High movie success.
[CLIP: From DreamWorks Animation’s Bee Movie]
bee: I have to say something do you like jazz
Harper: Oh well, finally, is there anything else you would like to add to your conversation with Karen?
Bushwick: Finally, I would like to end with a word from her. “The invention of digital bioacoustics is like the invention of the microscope,” she said.
Harper: oh.
Bushwick: The microscope opened up a whole new world for us and visually laid the foundation for countless scientific breakthroughs. And that’s exactly what digital bioacoustics is doing with speech for animal communication research. Karen says it’s like “a planetary-scale hearing aid that allows you to hear again with both your artificially enhanced ear and your imagination.”
Harper: What a great analogy!
Bushwick: Well, it will be very interesting to see where research goes from here and how our thinking about the so-called divide between humans and non-humans changes.
Harper: Yeah, I’m already questioning everything I thought I knew. Sophie, thank you for sharing all of this with us.
Bushwick: Squeak, squeak, buzz, buzz my friend.
Harper: And buzz, buzz, we’ll be back to you soon.
If you’re still interested, you can read more about this on our site.And of course, Karen’s new book, The Sounds of Life.Thank you for your viewing science, quickThis podcast is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, and myself, Kelso Harper. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
Today I would like to thank Martin Bencsik of Nottingham Trent University and James Nieh of the University of California, San Diego.
Bushwick: Don’t forget to subscribe. Also, visit ScientificAmerican.com for more in-depth science news features, podcasts and videos. For Scientific American Science, be quick. My name is Sophie Bushwick.
Harper: I’m Kelso Harper. see you.
Harper: i’m so excited. Also, I’ll turn your bubbly bass sweet potatoes into boobjobs.
Bushwick: yes. that’s all i wanted.
