Project CETI Identifies Human Speech-Like Patterns in Sperm Whale Communication

Key facts

• Project CETI, a non-profit research initiative in the United States (US), partnered with the University of California, Berkeley to study sperm whale communications.
• Sperm whales use strings of clicks known as codas for socialising.
• A study led by linguist Gašper Beguš examined nearly 4,000 codas from 15 individual whales between 2014 and 2018 in the Eastern Caribbean.
• The data set used in the research was provided by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project.
• Researchers identified two types of codas based on physical structure: a-codas, which consist of one formant, and i-codas, which consist of two formants.
• CETI is applying machine learning methods to identify trends and decipher the meaning of whale calls from large arrays of recordings.