Music, Language, and Technology in More-Than-Human Sonic Cultures

I’m sat at my office desk writing this review when I receive a notification on my phone. An alert of this kind would usually be unworthy of comment. Yet, this notification informs me of a recent BBC News article on sperm whale vocalization. Intrigued, I read the story, which explains how a team of Cetacean Translation Initiative (Ceti) researchers, led by PhD student Pratyusha Sharma at MIT, are using AI technology to analyse large bioacoustics datasets of sperm whale clicks. Their analysis shows that the combining of clicks in sperm whale communication appears to parallel the grouping of phonemes to create words in human languages. What the whales’ different rhythmic sequences of clicks — called ‘codas’ — mean, however, is still unknown. Scientists have, so far, only caught a glimpse of the lives of sperm whales, and so it is impossible to know at this stage what information is carried by particular combinations of codas. 1