The more social media grows, the harder it is to have a decent conversation, because what we call acrimony offline is valued as revenue-generating ‘engagement’ online. But meanwhile, the same digital technology that is creating so much acrimony is making it almost possible for humans to have a chat with other species—or at least, to begin to eavesdrop on their conversations. Artificial intelligence and big data make that possible, recognising patterns in communications. One day, they may be replicated to produce machine translation across species.
The newest experiment in the emerging field of ‘digital bioacoustics’ is the work of Yossi Yovel and Gerry Carter, which is referenced by Karen Bakker of the University of British Columbia in The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. Yovel studied the ‘speech’ of Egyptian fruit bats through voice recognition software and discovered a complex language. Bats argue about resources, and bat mothers use baby talk with their kids, which are higher social functions. Humans heighten their pitch when they teach ‘keywords’ to babies. Bats deepen their voices to do exactly the same thing.
Humans have been listening to animals for ages. It’s an essential skill in woodcraft. Fans of Jim Corbett know what the “belling of the sambhar” and the “call of the khaleej pheasant” mean in his hunting stories. They’re instances of humans using the communications of wildlife to find the way, whether they seek the predator, like Corbett did, or its prey, like game hunters do. Now, cheap, compact bioacoustic sensors can be strapped to birds and animals, and transmit their sounds continuously. That provides more extensive material for analysis, enough for machine learning. In earlier animal studies in the wild, only episodic behaviour could be captured.
In the second half of the 20th century, several experiments attempted to teach human communications to animals, ranging from parakeets like Iago, the voluble tormentor of Captain Haddock in The Castafiore Emerald, to primates, who are our closest cousins. The most celebrated experimental primates are the chimpanzees Viki, who could utter a few baby words, Washoe, who used sign language, and Nim Chimpsky (named facetiously for Noam Chomsky, without consent, manufactured or otherwise). More recent practitioners include the gorilla Koko who, it is claimed, understood English and could sign in reply.
There are now mixed feelings about these attempts to teach animals human language. As the politics of the scientific community changed, they came to be seen as anthropomorphic—like the circus acts in which chimps used to be trained to wear suits and smoke cigars. It is entirely possible that the apes who learned ‘language’ were mimicking human behaviour just to secure gratifications, without completely understanding what they were communicating.
The oldest breakthrough in non-human communications could not possibly be accused of anthropomorphism because the creature in question is so distant from humans on the evolutionary tree: the honeybee. And yet it was initially derided because the ability to transmit complex ideas was, in those anthropocentric times, regarded as a uniquely human achievement. In 1927, the Austrian researcher Karl von Frisch published Aus dem Leben der Bienen (The Dancing Bees in English), which contained three major findings: that bees have colour vision which they use to distinguish between flowers (though their visible spectrum is not identical with ours); that they orient themselves by the sun, the polarisation of light from the sky and the earth’s magnetic field to set a course to flower patches; and that they communicate the flowers’ location to bees back at the hive with a ‘waggle dance’. The ‘dance’, executed in flight at the mouth of the hive, describes the vector path to the patch of flowers with mathematical precision, laying down distance and the angle of the sun. After decades of ridicule, Frisch’s work won him the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Konrad Lorenz, who showed that on hatching, birds take the nearest large object to be their mother (often, it was Lorenz himself—ducklings followed him about), and Nikolaas Tinbergen, who showed that birds practise prenatal discrimination, preferring to brood eggs with prominent markings over plain eggs.
But to return to the issue of anthropomorphism, in 1974, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel published a hugely influential paper titled What is it like to be a bat? The answer is incomprehensible to humans, since the sensorium of a bat is completely different from ours and uses echolocation in place of vision. The only way to know what it’s like to be a bat is to actually be a bat, with a bat’s view of the world. Since species with different sensoria live in different and somewhat closed worlds, it is more useful to see how bats and apes talk to each other, rather than to humans.
That’s what Project CETI is doing. The acronym of the Cetacean Translation Initiative is a pun on SETI—Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—the global effort to parse electromagnetic radiation from space for possible signals from other sentient species. Subjected to natural language processing, the clicks and ‘songs’ of whales (many recordings are available on Spotify) suggest structure, which means that one day, when enough recordings accumulate for deep learning, we may have translations. But maybe, after being eavesdropped on for decades (whales were picked up on submarine sonar during World War II) we’ll only learn how tired whales are of all the attention. Maybe we’ll find that they’re telling each other in disgust: “Careful, those two-legged snoops are listening in again.”
Pratik Kanjilal
The India CableEditor of
(Tweets @pratik_k)