Latest news with #JeremyCollerFoundation
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
We're close to translating animal languages – what happens then?
Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors' first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won't be long before we join the conversation once again. The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy. Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026. The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals' interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another's native vocabulary. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic 'conversation' with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as 'whup/throp' with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U. But in the excitement we should not ignore the fact that other species are already bearing eloquent witness to our impact on the natural world. A living planet is a loud one. Healthy coral reefs pop and crackle with life. But soundscapes can decay just as ecosystems can. Degraded reefs are hushed deserts. Since the 1960s, shipping and mining have raised background noise in the oceans by about three decibels a decade. Humpback whale song occupies the same low-frequency bandwidth as deep-sea dredging and drilling for the rare earths that are vital for electronic devices. Ironically, mining the minerals we need to communicate cancels out whales' voices. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours. 'Song' is apt: they seem to include rhymed phrases, and their compositions travel the oceans with them, evolving as they go in a process called 'song revolutions', where a new cycle replaces the old. (Imagine if Nina Simone or the Beatles had erased their back catalogue with every new release.) They're crucial to migration and breeding seasons. But in today's louder soundscape, whale song is crowded out of its habitual bandwidth and even driven to silence – from up to 1.2 km away from commercial ships, humpback whales will cease singing rather than compete with the noise. In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually? The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal's umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? 'If a lion could talk,' writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein's famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, 'we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.' We should ask, then, how speaking with other beings might change us. Talking to another species might be very like talking to alien life. It's no coincidence that Ceti echoes Nasa's Seti – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – Institute. In fact, a Seti team recorded the whup/throp exchange, on the basis that learning to speak with whales may help us if we ever meet intelligent extraterrestrials. In Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, whale-like aliens communicate via a script in which the distinction between past, present and future times collapses. For Louise, the linguist who translates the script, learning Heptapod lifts her mind out of linear time and into a reality in which her own past and future are equally available. The film mentions Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic determinism – the idea that our experience of reality is encoded in language – to explain this. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was dismissed in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there may be some truth to it. Pormpuraaw speakers in northern Australia refer to time moving from east to west, rather than forwards or backwards as in English, making time indivisible from the relationship between their body and the land. Whale songs are born from an experience of time that is radically different to ours. Humpbacks can project their voices over miles of open water; their songs span the widest oceans. Imagine the swell of oceanic feeling on which such sounds are borne. Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we'd think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly. Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us. • David Farrier is the author of Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet (Canongate). Why Animals Talk by Arik Kershenbaum (Viking, £10.99) Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wiley-Blackwell, £24.95) An Immense World by Ed Yong (Vintage, £12.99)
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
We're close to translating animal languages – what happens then?
Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors' first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won't be long before we join the conversation once again. The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy. Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026. The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals' interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another's native vocabulary. The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic 'conversation' with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as 'whup/throp' with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U. But in the excitement we should not ignore the fact that other species are already bearing eloquent witness to our impact on the natural world. A living planet is a loud one. Healthy coral reefs pop and crackle with life. But soundscapes can decay just as ecosystems can. Degraded reefs are hushed deserts. Since the 1960s, shipping and mining have raised background noise in the oceans by about three decibels a decade. Humpback whale song occupies the same low-frequency bandwidth as deep-sea dredging and drilling for the rare earths that are vital for electronic devices. Ironically, mining the minerals we need to communicate cancels out whales' voices. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours. 'Song' is apt: they seem to include rhymed phrases, and their compositions travel the oceans with them, evolving as they go in a process called 'song revolutions', where a new cycle replaces the old. (Imagine if Nina Simone or the Beatles had erased their back catalogue with every new release.) They're crucial to migration and breeding seasons. But in today's louder soundscape, whale song is crowded out of its habitual bandwidth and even driven to silence – from up to 1.2 km away from commercial ships, humpback whales will cease singing rather than compete with the noise. In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually? The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal's umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? 'If a lion could talk,' writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein's famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, 'we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.' We should ask, then, how speaking with other beings might change us. Talking to another species might be very like talking to alien life. It's no coincidence that Ceti echoes Nasa's Seti – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – Institute. In fact, a Seti team recorded the whup/throp exchange, on the basis that learning to speak with whales may help us if we ever meet intelligent extraterrestrials. In Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, whale-like aliens communicate via a script in which the distinction between past, present and future times collapses. For Louise, the linguist who translates the script, learning Heptapod lifts her mind out of linear time and into a reality in which her own past and future are equally available. The film mentions Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic determinism – the idea that our experience of reality is encoded in language – to explain this. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was dismissed in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there may be some truth to it. Pormpuraaw speakers in northern Australia refer to time moving from east to west, rather than forwards or backwards as in English, making time indivisible from the relationship between their body and the land. Whale songs are born from an experience of time that is radically different to ours. Humpbacks can project their voices over miles of open water; their songs span the widest oceans. Imagine the swell of oceanic feeling on which such sounds are borne. Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we'd think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us. David Farrier is the author of Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet (Canongate). Why Animals Talk by Arik Kershenbaum (Viking, £10.99) Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wiley-Blackwell, £24.95) An Immense World by Ed Yong (Vintage, £12.99)
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dolphin whistle decoders win $100,000 interspecies communication prize
A $100,000 prize for communicating with animals has been scooped by researchers who have shed light on the meaning of dolphins' whistles. The Coller-Dolittle Prize for Two-way Inter-species Communication was launched last year by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. The winning team, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program led by Laela Sayigh and Peter Tyack from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been studying bottle-nosed dolphins in waters near Sarasota, Florida, for more than four decades. The researchers used non-invasive technologies such as hydrophones and digital acoustic tags attached by suction cups to record the animals' sounds. These include name-like 'signature' whistles, as well as 'non-signature' whistles – sounds that make up about 50% of the animals' calls but are poorly understood. In their latest work, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team identified at least 20 different types of non-signature whistle that are produced by multiple dolphins, finding two types were each shared by at least 25 individuals. When the researchers played these two sounds back to dolphins they found one triggered avoidance in the animals, suggesting it could be an alarm signal, while the other triggered a range of responses, suggesting it could be a sound made by dolphins when they encounter something unexpected. Sayigh said the win was a surprise, adding: 'I really didn't expect it, so I am beyond thrilled. It is such an honour.' The judging panel was led by Yossi Yovel, professor of zoology at Tel Aviv University, whose own team has previously used machine-learning algorithms to unpick the meaning of squeaks made by bats as they argue. 'We were mostly impressed by the long term, huge dataset that was created, and we're sure that it will lead to many more new and interesting results,' said Yovel, adding the judges were also impressed by team's use of non-invasive technology to record the animals' calls, and the use of drones and speakers to demonstrate the dolphins' responses in the field. Yovel added the judges hoped the prize would aid the application of AI to the data to reveal even more impressive results. Jonathan Birch, aprofessor of philosophy at London School of Economics and one of the judges, said the main thing stopping humans from cracking the code of animal communication was a lack of data. 'Think of the trillion words needed to train a large language model like ChatGPT. We don't have anything like this for other animals,' he said. 'That's why we need programs like the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which has built up an extraordinary library of dolphin whistles over 40 years. The cumulative result of all that work is that Laela Sayigh and her team can now use deep learning to analyse the whistles and perhaps, one day, crack the code.' Yovel said about 20 teams entered this year's competition, resulting in four finalists. Besides Sayigh and Tyack's team, these included teams working on understanding communication in nightingales, cuttlefish, and marmosets. He added the 202-26 prize was now open for applications. As well as an annual award of $100,000, there is also a grand prize up for grabs totalling either $10m in investment or $500,000 in cash. To win that, researchers must develop an algorithm to allow an animal to 'communicate independently without recognising that it is communicating with humans' – something Jeremy Coller suggested might be achieved within the next five years. The challenge is inspired by the Turing test for AI, whereby humans must be unable to tell whether they are conversing with a computer or a real person for the system to be deemed successful. Robert Seyfarth, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the prize, welcomed the win. 'These are outstanding scientists, doing work that has revolutionised our understanding of dolphin communication and cognition. This is well-deserved recognition,' he said. Clara Mancini, professor of animal-computer interaction at the Open University, said the dolphin work showed technology's potential to advance our understanding of animal communication, possibly one day even enabling people to communicate with them on their own terms. 'I think one of the main benefits of these advances is that they could finally demonstrate that animals' communication systems can be just as sophisticated and effective for use in the environments in which their users have evolved, as human language is for our species,' she said. 'However, on the journey towards interspecies communication, I would suggest, we need to remain mindful that deciphering a language is not the same as understanding the experience of language users and that, as well as curiosity, the challenge requires humility and respect for the unique knowledge and worldview that each species possesses.'
