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1 Nollman and the BowLingual
by Douglas Heingartner for the NY Times.
A $139 device, called "the Bowlingual" is a dog collar equipped with a wireless microphone that records a pet's barks, interprets them as emotions and transmits them as text messages like "I'm bored, let's play.". Takara, its Japanese manufacturer claims the device "comes a step closer to realizing everyone's childhood dream of conversing with their pet.
Though it all sounds very Dr. Dolittle, animal researchers have in fact been using voice-recognition technology for decades. The Bowlingual's developer says its technology is based on 2,000 voiceprints from roughly a thousand dogs. And it turns out that the utterances of many species can be analyzed and identified using many of the same techniques that have allowed human voice recognition to make the leap from high-tech novelty to valuable application.
In Braunschweig, Germany, for example, researchers at the Institute of Technology and Biosystems Engineering have recently been able to decipher, with about 90 percent accuracy, what cows mean when they moo: hunger, thirst, need for milking and so on.
Dr. Gerhard Jahns, a control engineer who helped devise the project, said that about 700 "vocalizations" were recorded from about 20 cows, a process he described as "extremely time-consuming." The system records the moos and scans them for specific tonal frequencies or aberrations: a cough at a certain pitch, for example, might indicate that Bessie is coming down with the flu. Dr. Jahns stressed, however, that the goal was "information, and not diagnosis" of the animals; it is ultimately up to the farmer to decide what to do.
Wojtek Kowalczyk, a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam who helped develop the project's software, said there was a big demand for such a system, although he estimated that wide-scale deployment was still three to five years away. Surprisingly, he said, the system's most commercially attractive feature is its ability to recognize estrus, or the period when the animal is in heat, which may last only a few hours. To make any such system practical, it has to be able to recognize unfamiliar voices. So-called "speaker independent" recognition is difficult for any voice application, as anyone who has tussled with a voice-based telephone directory knows too well. Professor Kowalczyk said that theoretically, this should be much easier to achieve with animals. Most of their vocabularies, or "repertoires," are smaller; the cow system, for example, recognizes about a dozen vocalizations.
But in practice the situation is quite different, he said, because the meaning of the source material ultimately remains elusive: "How can we know what a cow wanted to say?" Animal physiologists try to deduce the answer by imposing specific conditions: not milking a cow for a long period, for example, will increase the likelihood that a moo emitted under those circumstances means "I want to be milked." As the database of vocalizations expands, the results will improve.
Indeed, that computers have become so fast and cheap has been pivotal to this kind of research. "None of my current work could have existed even 18 months ago," said Jim Nollman, founder of a nonprofit organization called Interspecies Communication, who has worked on voice recognition for whales. "It's ironic and self-defeating that the study of whale sounds has been developing for 20 years using equipment that only records one-tenth of the frequency spectrum some of these species use."
That is partly a result of the limited hearing range of human beings: human ears peak out at frequencies of around 22 kilohertz. Many animals, however, communicate at levels well above this (or below it, in the case of elephants, for example). Recording just one second of 100-kilohertz sound, a common frequency among marine mammals, takes a megabyte; an all-day field recording, then, requires serious drive space.
These ultra-hi-fi recordings have helped reveal that the meaning of animal language is often generated not by the sounds themselves but rather by the way those sounds are modulated. A second of whale song, for example, contains thousands of Morse-code-like beats that whales use to communicate. And many birds seem to have a vocabulary of basically one call, which takes on different meanings based on its frequency or volume. "It's not syntax per se, but sequence,'' said Brenda McCowan, an assistant professor at the Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center at the University of California at Davis.
Dan Weary, a professor of animal welfare at the University of British Columbia, has used this knowledge of context to interpret pig calls. The pitch of a piglet's squeal, for instance, has been correlated with pain when it crosses the one-kilohertz threshold. This knowledge might allow farmers to prevent outbursts of tail-biting, in which frenzied piglets can wind up killing each other. If the software detects a certain number of piglets emitting very high-pitched squeals at the same time, it can automatically send the farmer a warning.
The Bowlingual has put off its American debut, mainly because of legal obstacles rather than economic ones. The device could, after all, misinterpret a menacing mood. "If the dog tries to bite a kid,'' Mr. Oda said, "then that could be difficult" as a liability issue in the United States - a consideration absent in Japan's less litigious culture.
for more info:
1. Buy your own bowlingual-translator
2. And don't forget the meow-lingual either
2 A Breakthrough in Whale language
Another recent article in the NY TImes, has given an unusual mainstream attention to the usually arcane science of whale language.
Researchers at MIT have now mathematically confirmed that humpback whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours. Until now, only humans have demonstrated the ability to use such a hierarchical structure of communication. The research, published online in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, offers a new approach to studying animal communication, although the authors do not claim that humpback whale songs meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language.
“Humpback songs are not like human language, but elements of language are seen in their songs." commented the principal researcher, Ryuji Suzuki, a predoctoral fellow in neuroscience. "With limited sight and sense of smell in water, marine mammals are more dependent on sound—which travels four times faster in water than air—to communicate."
For six months each year, all male humpback whales in a population sing the same song during mating season. Thought to attract females, the song evolves over time. Suzuki and co-authors John Buck and Peter Tyack applied the tools of information theory to analyze the complex patterns of moans, cries, and chirps in the whales' songs for clues to the information being conveyed.
Click here for more info on this study:
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A humpback back (left).
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Humpback circular wavelet graph generated by mark Fischer
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3 Global Warming Update
One of this nation's foremost climatologists has publicly accused the Bush administration of attempting to silence government-sponsored research that points to the advent of global warming. James E. Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies writes that the issues are critical for both national and environmental planning, and every citizen needs to ask why its government is subverting studies that conclude that sea levels may rise several meters over the next century. Here's a good place to start: read the human story of Hansen versus Bush from the Washington Post. Then go back five years and read what Hansen wrote on the NASA website about the relationship between science and government in defining the terms of the debate and its impact on future research. This guy should be on everybody's hero list.
4 This Month's Belly of the Whale Music Selection
Robin Rimbaud lives in the U.K., composing and recording music under the nom de plume of "Scanner". He is well known in digital music circles around the world, and has created the sound tracks for several films. Scanner is best known for a commission to compose the National Anthem for the European Union. He has undertaken the task in a most ingenious manner, combining and merging distinct musical phrases from the anthems of the 25 member nations within the Union. You can find Scanner's Belly of the Whale contribution here.
5 Links for March
- A Natural History of Peace. One cannot understand a primate in isolation from its social group. Across the 150 or so species of primates, the larger the average social group, the larger the cortex relative to the rest of the brain. The fanciest part of the primate brain, in other words, seems to have been sculpted by evolution to enable us to gossip and groom, cooperate and cheat, and obsess about who is mating with whom. Humans, in short, are yet another primate with an intense and rich social life -- a fact that raises the question of whether primatology can teach us something about a rather important part of human sociality: war and peace.
- The Bentley Snow Crystal Collection is a great place to visit if you need a 10 minute respite tfrom your life just to know once again that the world functions very well without any of us. So relax, enjoy the spring flowers, and take a look at page after page of unique six-sided snow.
See you next month.
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