14 Jul 2003

Alan W Black, Tanja Schultz, and Robert Frederking (CMU)

After working in the area of rapid development of speech-to-speech translation systems for human languages with limited resources, we were recently contacted about applying our techniques to communication with dolphins. Of course although full translation is not feasible, there a number of ways speech technology can help in dolphin research.

Working with the Wild Dolphin Project, who have almost 20 years of experience with a pod of spotted dolphins 40 miles off the Bahamas, we are using their existing recordings for this work, and currently designing new equipment to allow collection of more data.

After a general description of dolphin acoustics, this talk will describe some areas where speech recognition technology can be used to better classify dolphin recordings, and present initial results on a simple dolphin ID system based on signature whistles. Also we will describe a framework for an experiment we intend to run later this summer, to investigate how dolphins may relate to synthesized noises in their acoustic domain, and how they may mimic them.

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