"The CymaScope provides our first glimpse into what the dolphins might be 'seeing' with their sounds." "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," Kassewitz said. In addition to the whistle-like sounds, dolphins produce chirps and click trains, suggesting they engage in very complex and sophisticated social interactions. Similar to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, the researchers may then be able to figure out the meaning of dolphin calls. If a person whistles after sucking in helium, the pitch of the tune will then be 1.74 times higher than if he or she whistles after breathing in just air.Īcoustics engineer John Stuart Reid and Jack Kassewitz of the organization Speak Dolphin have created an instrument known as the CymaScope that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. The reason is because the mixture has a sound speed that's 1.74 times higher than normal air. The dolphin breathed in a "heliox" mixture consisting of 80 percent helium and 20 percent oxygen - a concoction that causes humans to sound like, as the scientists put it, Donald Duck.
WATCH VIDEO: DOLPHINS INVENT A NEW WAY TO HUNT FISH Madsen, a researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at Aarhus University, and his team studied how dolphins communicate by digitizing and reanalyzing recordings made in 1977 of a 12-year-old male bottlenose dolphin. NEWS: Dolphin Whisperer Could Help Us Talk to E.T.
"When we or animals are whistling, the tune is defined by the resonance frequency of some air cavity," said Peter Madsen, lead author of the research appearing in Royal Society Biology Letters."The problem is that when dolphins dive, their air cavities are compressed due to the increasing ambient pressure, which means that they would produce a higher and higher pitch the deeper they dive if they actually whistle."
Communicating similar to the way that humans do solves what would otherwise be a major dolphin problem.
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