Crowdsourcing Whale Songs

Ever pondered the secret meaning behind whale songs? Now we can all help build a decoder ring for those playful clicks and plaintive wails.

In a new global crowdsourcing effort called Whale FM, experts in the U.S. and in the U.K. are calling on volunteers to sort through about 15,000 calls from killer whales and pilot whales around the world. Volunteers decide which calls match up the best, then researchers compare matched calls with the whales’ location at the time of recording and whether they were hunting, say, or playing.

BLOG: Whale and Dolphin Games?

The hope is that careful categorization of the songs will turn up new phrases, meanings and dialects, which scientists already know are quite sophisticated and distinct from one whale family to the next. For this project, the researchers captured songs from 25 whales with names such as Lilo, Geoffrey, and Sam. 

Why not let a computer to do the job? It turns out that the human brain is much better than a machine at recognizing patterns. As a participant in Whale FM, you listen to the songs as you watch a spectrogram, a visual pattern of sound waves, for each recording. Indeed, the project is more about matching the shapes of the songs than the sounds themselves—good news for whale lovers who are hearing impaired (or just tone deaf).

Scientific American launched the project Tuesday with partner Zooniverse, an online citizen science organization that rallied 200,000 volunteer astronomers who cuffed a galaxy killer last year:

BLOG: Star Birth Watered Down in Galaxies with Bars

Other crowdsourcing efforts led to the discovery last month of a near-earth asteroid and offered solutions for safer humanitarian air drops:

BLOG: Near-Earth Asteroid Discovered Via Crowdsourcing

NEWS: Humanitarian Air Drop Snafus Get Crowd-Sourced

Scientific American has sponsored similar projects in the past—to track dragonfly swarms and the Gulf oil spill, for example.

"One doesn't need a science degree to be a citizen scientist,” editor in chief Mariette DiChristina said in a press release. “All you need is a curiosity about the world around you and an interest in observing, measuring and reporting what you hear and see."

IMAGES:

Killer whale, half breach. (Courtesy mrmritter on Flickr)

Screen shot of Whale FM.

View the original article here