In 1975, Serge Masse was visiting with Inuit people in Canada who were hunting beluga whales. “The whales’ behavior showed amazing intelligence,” he recalls. “They seemed to me as if they were trying to use acoustic communication in the air to get the hunters to stop shooting. It took two speed boats with trained hunters using multiple high-power rifles to kill them. I heard many of their sounds in the air before they were shot. They were also apparently young adults sacrificing themselves in order to save the herd. The pair attracted the hunters away from the herd and into shallow waters and were displaying complex coordination for maybe an hour before getting killed.”
In addition to convincing Masse that even whale hunting by natives should be stopped, the episode sparked his interest in cetacean acoustic communication. Eventually that interest led him to create Seadragon: software that lets anyone create, broadcast, and receive the whistles and other sounds produced by dolphins, porpoises, and whales.
The project offers not only software, but a user guide and technical background of the project. It also hosts a whistles exchange where users of the software can post profiles of the whistles they record. So far, no one has done so, which is a disappointment to Masse. “I have no budget for marketing it to the general public, and the few researchers that have shown interest have their own projects to worry about. It also appears as if the subject of interactive communication research like the type for which Seadragon was designed is intimidating to most researchers with careers to worry about.” Yet Masse says “my non-scientific and informal research showed me that interactive equipment enabling chat-like communication was required in order to get to the bottom of whether or not whales speak. It may not be quite like our languages, but they may be using concepts also.”
Masse says Seadragon gets a few downloads per week despite the fact that in US locations it may be illegal to emit sounds underwater without a special permit, which is very difficult for researchers to obtain. “I do know that it was successfully tried by NOAA and MIT in two labs, but without cetaceans. It was also mentioned by David Rothenberg in his great 2008 book, ‘Thousand Mile Song.’ David uses his own clarinet-based equipment and musical ears for acoustic communication research.”
The project hasn’t been updated in more than three years, but Masse says he is currently porting Seadragon to the Android platform. “I also have designs for more social networking features and also versions for other families of species.”
In addition to the satisfaction of possibly facilitating inter-species communication, Masse says he learned a lot about multithreading and networking from working on his project – skills which he now uses in his day job.