![]() There is growing evidence that dolphins can take a sonic 'snap shot' of an object and send it to other dolphins, using sound as the transmission medium. The answer appears to lie in the development of brain systems that require huge auditory processing power. Nature tends not to evolve brain mass without a need, so we must ask ourselves what dolphins do with all that brain capacity. "I have long held the belief that the dolphin brain, comparable in size with our own, has specialized in processing auditory data in much the same way that the human brain has specialized in processing visual data. Horace Dobbs, a leading authority on dolphin-assisted therapy, has joined the team as consultant. This is uncharted territory but it looks very promising.”ĭr. Our ultimate aim is to speak to dolphins with a basic vocabulary of dolphin sounds and to understand their responses. ![]() The CymaScope will be used to image the sounds so that each CymaGlyph will represent a dolphin ‘picture word’. By recording dolphins as they echolocate on various objects, and also as they communicate with other dolphins about those objects, we will build a library of dolphin sounds, verifying that the same sound is always repeated for the same object. Recent advances in high frequency recording techniques have made it possible for us to capture more detail in dolphin sounds than ever before. Speaking from Key Largo, Florida, he said, “Dolphins are able to emit complex sounds far above the human range of hearing. Kassewitz has planned a series of experiments to record the sounds of dolphins targeting a range of objects. These fine details can be captured on camera.” The CymaScope employs the surface tension of water as a membrane because water reacts quickly and is able to reveal intricate architectures within the sound form. Reid explained their novel sound imaging technique: “Whenever sound bubbles or beams interact with a membrane, the sound vibrations imprint onto its surface and form a CymaGlyph, a repeatable pattern of energy. At frequencies audible to humans (20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz) the sound-bubble form dominates above 20,000 Hertz the shape of sound becomes increasingly beam shaped, similar to a lighthouse beam in appearance. The holographic aspect stems from the physics theory that even a single molecule of air or water carries all the information that describes the qualities and intensity of a given sound. The team has recognized that sound does not travel in waves, as is popularly believed, but in expanding holographic bubbles and beams. The CymaScope provides our first glimpse into what the dolphins might be ‘seeing’ with their sounds.” Kassewitz, of the Florida-based dolphin communication research project said, “There is strong evidence that dolphins are able to ‘see’ with sound, much like humans use ultrasound to see an unborn child in the mother’s womb. ![]() Now that dolphin chirps, click-trains and whistles can be converted into CymaGlyphs, we have an important tool for deciphering their meaning." The CymaGlyphs produced on the CymaScope can be likened to the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. ![]() "Jean-Francois Champollion and Thomas Young used the Rosetta Stone to discover key elements of the primer that allowed the Egyptian language to be deciphered. Reid said that the technique has similarities to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins. The CymaScope has the ability to visualize dimensional structure within sound. Within the field of cetacean research, theory states that dolphins have evolved the ability to translate dimensional information from their echolocation sonic beam. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin’s natural environment-water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. Left: cymaglyph of adult dolphin voice, Right: cymaglyph of a baby dolphin calling to its motherĬertain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult.
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