[lit-ideas] Re: CymaGlyphs, holographic bubbles, & dolphin-speak...

  • From: cblists@xxxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 11:01:10 +0100


On 2-Jan-09, at 1:57 AM, Julie Krueger wrote:

Thanks for this Julie.

Below are a few nagging doubts ...


Songs From The Sea: Deciphering Dolphin Language With Picture Words
... The resulting "CymaGlyphs" ... are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin 'picture word.'
Are 'words' the basic elements of language? Or phonemes? Or are smaller elements only 'meaningful' within sentences, or indeed a 'conceptual scheme' (cf. 'language game')?
... The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin's natural environment-water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.
But for the dolphins these details are not visual- they are aural. At best we will have some sort of analogy; at worse a misleading 'picture' that focuses on aspects which are not essential to the experience (see my comments about Bach's 'architecture' below).
...t the technique has similarities to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. ... The CymaGlyphs produced on the CymaScope can be likened to the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. Now that dolphin chirps, click-trains and whistles can be converted into CymaGlyphs, we have an important tool for deciphering their meaning."
These 'similarities' seem rather insignificant in comparison to the dissimilarities - written symbols that are in no way an attempt to captiure the aural features of language as opposed to photographs of aural events, visual vs. aural 'images'; intraspecific (human-human) vs. interspecific (human-dolphin) communication, etc.
"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. The CymaScope provides our first glimpse into what the dolphins might be 'seeing' with their sounds."
Note the 'scare quotes' around 'see'. The ultrasound analogy seems inappropriate here. We are not attempting to see the foetus's language behaviour - we are adopting a less intrusive technique to take a look at what more dangerous surgery, x-rays, etc. would show us. (There has been much said about our preoccupation with visual evidence in health care that seems related here.)
The team has recognized that sound does not travel in waves, as is popularly believed, but in expanding holographic bubbles and beams. The holographic aspect stems from the physics theory that even a single molecule of air or water carries all the information that describes the qualities and intensity of a given sound. At frequencies audible to humans (20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz) the sound- bubble form dominates; above 20,000 Hertz the shape of sound becomes increasingly beam shaped, similar to a lighthouse beam in appearance.
Here again we have a visual 'interpretation' of aural 'experience'. It may be interesting to 'translate', say, a Beethoven piano sonata into some sort of visual presentation - but the resulting 'imaging' will not capture or communicate what is essential to the aural experience. Could something analogous go missing in an 'aural' to 'visual' 'translation' of dolphin 'songs' (the necessity for so many 'scare quotes' is telling, I think.) 
... intricate architectures within the sound form.
Again - at best an analogy. The oft-commented 'architecture' of Bach's musical works does not explain what to me is essential about them (as compared to other music with similar architecture yet somehow lacking that essential ...).
By recording dolphins as they echolocate on various objects, and also as they communicate with other dolphins about those objects, we will build a library of dolphin sounds, verifying that the same sound is always repeated for the same object. The CymaScope will be used to image the sounds so that each CymaGlyph will represent a dolphin 'picture word'.
Among many other things, cf. Wittgenstein on object/picture 'correspondence'. 
Nature tends not to evolve brain mass without a need ...
I have yet to read or hear a convincing argument for this statement, which seems to run counter to what I understand about evolution.
so we must ask ourselves what dolphins do with all that brain capacity. The answer appears to lie in the development of brain systems that require huge auditory processing power. There is growing evidence that dolphins can take a sonic 'snap shot' of an object and send it to other dolphins, using sound as the transmission medium. We an therefore hypothesize that the dolphin's primary method of communication is picture based. Thus, the picture- based imaging method, employed by Reid and Kassewitz, seems entirely plausible."
A reiteration of the problems of 'aural'-'visual' analogy coupled with the 'object-picture correspondence' theory of language.
During my times in the water with dolphins, there have been several occasions when they seemed to be very determined to communicate with me.
During my times in the lane (bearing, by the way, the name 'Philosophengang') beside the house feeding the feral cats, they also seem very interested in communicating with me - or is all that mewing and meowing merely behaviour reinforced by my feeding activities?
'Nelly' is particularly vocal - and the way she shuts her eyes and beams all over when I tell her how beautiful she is ... (has anyone else noticed cats' particular sensitivity to declarations of their aesthetic perfection?).
What *is* it like to be a dolphin? Is there anything new here that isn't covered by Thomas Nagel's 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?'? 

Chris Bruce,
bumping into the walls, in
Kiel, Germany
--


------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. lit-ideas
  3. Archive
  4. 01-2009