What would Flipper say if he could talk?
My best guess: “Hey, Bud and Sandy. Why don’t you put on a little SPF 35? Or better yet, how about a shirt?”
That’s assuming, of course, that Flipper cared about healthy skin. Dolphins might not know about the dangers of sunburn.
Researchers with the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida are working on a plan to talk with Flipper’s kind. Using a small, underwater computer as an intermediary, a diver could analyze dolphin sounds and respond in real time — potentially the first-ever back and forth humans have had with the marine mammals.
The New Scientist reports researchers essentially want to co-create a language with dolphins, primarily through sounds they already use when communicating with each other.
The challenges? They have more to do with sounds than with the human-dolphin divide, the New Scientist reports:
Knowing what to listen for is a huge challenge. Dolphins can produce sound at frequencies up to 200 kilohertz – around 10 times as high as the highest pitch we can hear – and can also shift a signal’s pitch or stretch it out over a long period of time.
The animals can also project sound in different directions without turning their heads, making it difficult to use visual cues alone to identify which dolphin in a pod “said” what and to guess what a sound might mean.
Read the full story: “Talk with a dolphin via underwater translation machine.”