What Can Whales Teach Us About the Complexity of Sound?

🐋 What can whales teach us about the complexity of sound?

Scientists working with Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) are using machine learning and bioacoustics to investigate the complex click patterns used by sperm whales.

In peer-reviewed research published in Nature Communications, researchers identified previously recognised and newly characterised features of sperm-whale codas involving rhythm, tempo, rubato and ornamentation, describing a combinatorial system they call a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.”

This does not mean AI has translated whale language.

What it does demonstrate is how sophisticated acoustic analysis and machine learning can reveal patterns within sound that may be difficult to recognise through listening alone.

A research question for sound therapy

For the Australian Sound Healers Association, developments like this raise an interesting research question:

Could increasingly sophisticated acoustic analysis also help us better understand the complex characteristics of therapeutic sound?

Rather than focusing only on individual frequencies or claims about particular Hz values, future sound-therapy research can examine sound as a complex, evolving acoustic event — including spectrum, harmonics, amplitude, rhythm, temporal structure and other measurable characteristics — and investigate how those characteristics relate to measurable human responses.

Sound is complex. Our methods for studying it are becoming more sophisticated.

That is where we believe some of the most interesting conversations about the future of sound therapy should be happening.

Australian Sound Healers Association (ASHA)
Supporting education, professional standards and evidence-informed discussion in sound therapy.

Explore our approach to evidence-informed practice on the ASHA Science page, or learn about becoming a practitioner through our Sound Therapy Practitioner Training.

Sources
Project CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative
Sharma et al. (2024), Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations, Nature Communications, 15, 3617.