If We Could Talk To The Animals, Just Imagine It

Actually, we have all talked to animals thousands of times. And, usually we use goofy voices. But, that’s beside the point.

What if the animals could talk back to us, if we could understand them? Now, that would be huge. That would be a major breakthrough.

Wouldn’t it?

Probably not. Most of what you would hear would probably be along the lines of; “Hey, you going to finish that steak?”, if it was Fido speaking. Or, “Everybody hide, here come those humans again”, if they they were wild animals deer, raccoons, foxes etc.

But, dolphins, now that’s another matter. We believe that dolphins communicate vocally with each other, and, some believe that they would like to share their thoughts with us.

Plus dolphins are cute.

From Fox, comes this story about a researcher that claims to have figured out some of what dolphins are saying to other dolphins.

Humans have taken a major step forward in unlocking the mysteries of dolphin-speak and found their communication is more complicated than originally thought.

A researcher who spent three years listening to bottlenose dolphins living off the coast of Byron Bay has found certain whistles are linked to specific behavior.

Doctoral candidate Liz Hawkins from Southern Cross University’s Whale Research Center in Lismore, New South Wales, listened in to more than 50 different pods of dolphins.

Using the starting and final frequency of the sound and its duration, she distinguished 186 distinct whistle types among the 1,650 recorded, of which 20 were common to more than one pod.

What are the dolphins saying to each other? Well, according to Ms. Hawkins mostly stuff like; “Hey we’re over here” or, “We found some food”. That’s not to say that the dolphins don’t address more weighty topics, she has just identified some simple ones so far.

It got me to thinking about something I saw a long time ago in Guitar Player magazine, which was my main source of news during my formative years. I recalled seeing an electric guitar, that some guy built so a researcher could play, through underwater speakers, in an effort to talk to dolphins and whales.

After a fairly extensive web search (because there have been several commercial guitar models named Dolphin and a retailer called Dolphin Music), I found the very guitar I saw those many years ago.

The guitar was built by Oregon luthier Phil Cacopardo in 1979 and was given to an outfit called Inerspecies. I found the picture at the Interspecies website.

What does Interspecies do? Well, I’m glad you asked.

empowers artists to re-invent the human relationship with animals, with the objective of healing our species’ emotional, spiritual, and cultural ties with nature.

Our best known work brings musicians together with wild whales and dolphins to explore the potential for interspecies communication.

They talk to animals, mostly dolphins and whales. A lot of it consists of musicians, going out on a boat and making noise, and sometimes the dolphins or whales make little noises back. There are some audio samples at the website, of Interspecies founder, Jim Nollman, playing the above guitar to dolphins/whales and getting some responses. It’s a good sounding guitar, by the way.

So, on one hand we have Liz Hawkins, who can understand some of what dolphins are saying and, on the other hand we have the folks at Interspecies who regularly go out and make noise with dolphins. Obviously these two parties should get together.

Clearly, we have a long way to go before we, “re-invent the human relationship with animals, with the objective of healing our species’ emotional, spiritual, and cultural ties with nature” because, most of what we know about what dolphins are saying is; “Hey we’re over here” or, “We found some food”. But, you have to start somewhere.