New algorithm can differentiate among individual dolphin calls

New York Times : Among their many vocalizations, dolphins can produce unique whistles that serve to identify them. In the past, researchers have been able to use spectrographic representations of dolphins’ whistles to identify the dolphin that produced them. However, because an individual dolphin’s whistle can vary over time, designing an algorithm that can identify signature whistles has proven difficult. Now Arik Kershenbaum of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and colleagues have succeeded in developing such an algorithm by incorporating the Parsons code , a system developed in 1975 to identify a piece of music. The code tracks the melodic motion of a song by noting whether each note is higher, lower, or the same as the previous note. The new algorithm has proven to be very accurate at identifying individual dolphins’ signature whistles and could therefore be useful in future studies involving the quantification of whistle similarity, according to the group’s paper , which was published in the journal PLOS ONE.