Listen to a beluga whale that changed its voice to try and sound like a human

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Listen to a beluga whale that changed its voice to try and sound like a human

In the most awesome animal news you’ll hear all week, a beluga whale named “Noc” at the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program in San Diego, California learned, and adapted its own whale voice to try and sound like a human in an attempt to cross the human-whale lingual divide.

This recording was made several years ago before the whale died, but it’s absolutely real. The whale is not just making whale noises— marine biologists working at the facility confirmed that the whale actually drastically altered its voice and noise pattern in a real attempt to mimic human speech.

Listen:

According to marine researcher Sam Ridgway, the noises heard in the recording are not only unusual for a beluga, but — he suspects — somewhat difficult for NOC to produce.

“Our observations suggest that the whale had to modify its vocal mechanics in order to make the speech-like sounds,” explained Ridgway — president of the National Marine Mammal Foundation and lead author on the paper describing the vocalizations, published in the latest issue of Current Biology. “The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale.”

Pretty amazing, right? So is the story of how Ridgway and his colleagues first came to realize the vocalizations were coming from NOC in the first place. The researchers explain:

After seven years in our care… a white whale called NOC began, spontaneously, to make unusual sounds… Whale vocalizations often sounded as if two people were conversing in the distance just out of range for our understanding. These ‘conversations’ were heard several times before the whale was identified as the source… The whale was exposed to speech not only from humans at the surface — it was [also] present at times when divers used surface-to-diver communication equipment.

The whale was recognized as the source of the speech-like sounds when a diver surfaced outside this whale’s enclosure and asked “Who told me to get out?” Our observations led us to conclude the “out” which was repeated several times came from NOC.

By attaching pressure sensors in and above NOC’s nasal cavity, Ridgway and his colleagues were able to determine that the whale generated the sound by modulating air pressure inside his nasal tract, causing a structure known as “phonic lips” (labeled red in this diagram of a dolphin head) to vibrate and produce sounds similar to those produced by human vocal cords.

The ramifications of this study are numerous and far-reaching. We already know cetaceans to be remarkably intelligent creatures, and evidence for their capacity to mimic human speech opens up incredible opportunities in research ranging from human cognition to inter-species communication.

Via