Technology usually distracts us from nature. But now technology is "offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world," wrote professor Karen Bakker in her new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals.
All around the animal kingdom, there are sounds that we struggle to pick up and understand.
Elephants, for example, communicate with each other using infrasound (次声波), a sound frequency far below our human hearing range. Coral (珊瑚) in the ocean also communicates with each other through sound waves, with one purpose being to attract baby coral to areas where it can successfully grow. This is a shocking fact as coral doesn't have any ears! Scientists have placed listening devices in these environments to pick up sounds humans are normally unable to detect.
After the sounds are recorded, AI is then able to determine their meaning, according to the news website Vox. There are now whole databases of whale songs and honeybee dances. Bakker wrote that one day this information could be turned into "a zoological version of Google Translate". One animal language Bakker wrote about is that of the elephant. She explained how elephants "have a different signal for honeybee, which is a threat, and a different signal for human," in an interview with Vox. "Moreover, they distinguish between threatening humans and non-threatening humans, " she said.
Technology can not only understand the animals, but also communicate back to them. For example, bees use dances to communicate to their peers where to go in search of nectar（花蜜), A research team in Germany, therefore, plugged the bee language AI database system into a robot bee, allowing the robot to create a dance routine that can tell the bees which direction to move, Vox reported. Whereas in the past language creation had been limited to mainly apes( 类 人 猿 ), with there being many examples of chimpanzees(黑猩猩) having been taught sign language to communicate with humans, this new technology now allows humans to socialize with different animals throughout the animal kingdoms.
