In the 1970s, a gorilla (大猩猩) known as Koko became world-famous when scientists taught her to use human sign language to communicate with people. There were numerous attempts in the mid-1900s to teach human language to nonhumans, such as Koko. But what we should have been thinking about was their abilities to engage in complex communication on their own terms instead of trying to teach an animal to talk to us in human language.
Today scientists are trying to figure out how living things already share information using their particular methods. This new field of study is known as digital bioacoustics, and it involves using tools to understand the production of sounds and their effects on living things.
Scientists in this field are using sensors, which are devices that pick up and record information on physical or chemical conditions. Some are also using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, an approach that uses algorithms (算法). The same algorithms that we use in tools such as Google Translate to translate documents can also be used to find patterns in nonhuman communication.
Jeremy of Tel Aviv University studied nearly two dozen Egyptian fruit bats for two and a half months and recorded their vocalizations. His team adapted a voice-recognition program to study 15,000 of the sounds. The algorithm matched specific sounds with specific things the bats were doing. Using this program, the researchers were able to classify most of the bats' sounds. Jeremy and other researchers have found that bats have a much more complex language than we previously understood. Bats argue over food; they distinguish (区分) between genders when they communicate with one another and they have individual names, or "signature calls".
That's a great example of how AI is able to find these patterns from information gathered by sensors and microphones. AI reveals things that we can't hear with our human ears alone because most bat communication happens above our hearing range, and because bats speak much faster than we do, we have to slow it down to listen to it. So we cannot listen like a bat, but our computers can. And our computers can also speak back to the bat by producing specific patterns.
Digital bioacoustics is like an amazing hearing aid. It lets us listen to animals with both our digitally enhanced (增强的) ears and our imagination. This is slowly opening our minds not only to the wonderful sounds that nonhumans make, but to a fundamental set of questions about the so-called divide between humans and nonhumans, as well as our connection to other species. It's also opening up new ways to think about protecting living things and our relationship with the planet. It's pretty meaningful.
