Talking Dolphins

Another Anglo-American collaboration addresses the agonizing question of how to understand the smug patois of a pod of dolphins. An acoustical engineer in Cumbria has produced a "Cymascope" to begin deciphering the speech of seagoing mammals. His device responds to whale and dolphin recordings captured by a Florida researcher, outputting visuals of the sounds the animals make.

The description from Sky News sounds very much like an educational demonstration in an introductory physics course. The lecturer plays a continuous note (frequency) through a speaker underneath a metal plate thinly layered on top with sand. The sound waves vibrate the plate pooling the sand into rings representing the nodes in the oscillations of the sound waves. These cymascope operators recognize that they have lots of work to do to create a reliable understanding of cetacean speech, but questions remain as to what properties of visualization are actually new about this instrument or unique to cetaceans.

Additionally, sci-fi fans everywhere can advise that simply translating a dolphin's speech does not necessarily make him an eloquent conversationalist (sound alert).