Whalesong

Whale vocalization

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They have come back from the brink of extinction, thanks to international cooperation. If people are inspired to care and cooperate for the well being of the planet, then there is hope. Roger Payne published the first recordings of the Songs of the Humpback Whales, it inspired the movement to protect them. In the year , Whalesong Project volunteers adopted new technologies to, for the first time, bring the songs directly to homes and classrooms throughout the world, in real time.

We heard from thousands of people that were inspired. Our project is grassroots, low budget, all volunteer, a labor of love. We webcast the live mysterious songs of the whales for most of 15 seasons. Recently circumstances prevent us having our buoy in the ocean. This may take a few minutes, as Racket is compiling Whalesong, its dependencies, and its documentation. When it finally finishes, you should see a "whalesong" launcher in the current directory. You should also see a "whalesong-gui" launcher that includes a minimal graphical user interface. At this point, you should be able to run the "whalesong" executable from the command line.

The Whalesong command-line tool for compiling Racket to JavaScript.

The Mystery of Whale Song

Otherwise, Racket will try to recompile Whalesong on every single use, which can be very expensive. We can do something slightly more interesting. Call this file "dom-play. Whalesong also allows functions defined from Racket to be used from JavaScript.

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As an example, we can take the boring factorial function and define it in a module called "fact. The files can also be downloaded here: Instead of creating a standalone.

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This file does require some runtime support not included in "fact. Whalesong provides a command-line utility called whalesong for translating Racket to JavaScript. It can be run in several modes:. To use it, pass the name of the file to it: For more advanced users, whalesong can be used to generate JavaScript in non-standalone mode. This gives the web developer more fine-grained control over how to control and deploy the outputted program. Given the name of a program, this builds ". Given the name of a program, writes the JavaScript to standard output, as well as its dependent modules.

By default, the given program will be treated as a main module.

All main modules will be executed when the JavaScript function plt. Graphical programs will often use ". When Whalesong compiles a program into a package, these resources will be bundled alongside the JavaScript-compiled output. If the resource given has an extension one of the following: If the resource has the extension ". Given a resource , gets a URL. The web-world library allows you to write functional event-driven World programs for the web; the user defines functional callbacks to handle events, and receive and consume a world argument.

One difference introduced by the web is the web page itself: This library presents a functional version of the DOM in the form of a view. The first thing we can do is mock up a web page with a user interface, like this. Write a file called "tick-tock. Several things are happening here. We use define-resource to refer to external files, like "view.

We use big-bang to start up a computation that responses to events. The big-bang consumes an initial world, as well as several handlers to configure it, described next: Normally, x will be a resource to a web page. By default, this will send a clock tick 28 times a second, but if given delay , it will use that instead. During the extent of a big-bang, a form widget will appear in the document.

The optional event argument will contain numbers for "latitude" and "longitude". The draw function will be called every time an event occurs. A view is a functional representation of the browser DOM tree. A view is always focused on an element, and the functions in this subsection show how to traverse and manipulate the view. Common values for x include resource s. String Return true if the view can be focused using the given id. String Focuses the view on an element, given the id. The view will be searched starting from the toplevelmost node. Attach a world-updating event to the focus.

When the world-updater is called, the view will be focused on the element that triggered the event. Common event types include "click" , "mouseenter" , "change". Note that the name of the event should not include an "on" prefix.

Whalesong: a Racket to JavaScript compiler

As a convenience the API provides some syntactic support to bind multiple handlers at once: Composes the use of view-focus and view-bind to conveniently bind multiple handlers at once. Sight is less effective for marine mammals because of the particulate way in which the ocean scatters light. Smell is also limited, as molecules diffuse more slowly in water than in air, which makes smelling less effective. However, the speed of sound is roughly four times greater in water than in the atmosphere at sea level.

Because sea mammals are so dependent on hearing to communicate and feed, environmentalists and cetologists are concerned that they are being harmed by the increased ambient noise in the world's oceans caused by ships , sonar and marine seismic surveys. The word " song " is used to describe the pattern of regular and predictable sounds made by some species of whales, notably the humpback whale. This is included with or in comparison with music , and male humpback whales have been described as "inveterate composers " of songs that are "'strikingly similar' to human musical traditions".

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This clicking sequences reportedly allow the groups to coordinate foraging activities. Humans produce voiced sounds by passing air through the larynx. Within the larynx, when the vocal cords are brought close together, the passing air will force them to alternately close and open, separating the continuous airstream into discrete pulses of air that are heard as a vibration.

Cetacean sound production differs markedly from this mechanism. The precise mechanism differs in the two major suborders of cetaceans: Odontocetes produce rapid bursts of high-frequency clicks that are thought to be primarily for echolocation. Specialized organs in an odontocete produce collections of clicks and buzzes at frequencies from 0. Lower frequencies are used for distance echolocation, due to the fact that shorter wavelengths do not travel as far as longer wavelengths underwater.

Higher frequencies are more effective at shorter distances, and can reveal more detailed information about a target.

Hear the Whales Sing by Building Your Own Hydrophone

Echoes from clicks convey, not only the distance to the target, but also the size, shape, speed, and vector of its movement. Additionally, echolocation allows the odontocete to easily discern the difference between objects that are different in material composition, even if visually identical, by their different densities.

Individuals also appear to be able to isolate their own echoes during pod feeding activity without interference from other pod members' echolocations.

Whistles are used for communication, and four- to six-month-old calves develop unique sounds that they use most frequently throughout their lives. Such "signature whistles" are distinctive to the individual and may serve as a form of identification among other odontocetes. Frankel quotes one researcher who says listening to a school of odontocetes is like listening to a group of children at a school playground. The multiple sounds odontocetes make are produced by passing air through a structure in the head called the phonic lips.

As the air passes through this narrow passage, the phonic lip membranes are sucked together, causing the surrounding tissue to vibrate. These vibrations can, as with the vibrations in the human larynx, be consciously controlled with great sensitivity. Every toothed whale except the sperm whale has two sets of phonic lips and is thus capable of making two sounds independently. From there, the air may be recycled back into the lower part of the nasal complex, ready to be used for sound creation again, or passed out through the blowhole.

The French name for phonic lips, museau de singe , translates literally as "monkey's muzzle", which the phonic lip structure is supposed to resemble. Baleen whales formally called mysticetes do not have phonic lip structure. Instead, they have a larynx that appears to play a role in sound production, but it lacks vocal cords, and scientists remain uncertain as to the exact mechanism. It is likely that they recycle air around the body for this purpose. There are at least nine separate blue whale acoustic populations worldwide. Calls are progressively getting lower in frequency.

For example the Australian pygmy blue whales are decreasing their mean call frequency rate at approximately 0. The migration patterns of blue whales remains unclear. Some populations appear to be resident in habitats of year-round high productivity in some years, [17] while others undertake long migrations to high-latitude feeding grounds, but the extent of migrations and the components of the populations that undertake them are poorly known. While the complex sounds of the humpback whale and some blue whales are believed to be primarily used in sexual selection , [21] the simpler sounds of other whales have a year-round use.

For instance, the depth of water or the existence of a large obstruction ahead may be detected by loud noises made by baleen whales. The question of whether whales sometimes sing purely for aesthetic enjoyment, personal satisfaction, or 'for art's sake', is considered by some to be "an untestable question". Two groups of whales, the humpback whale and the subspecies of blue whale found in the Indian Ocean , are known to produce a series of repetitious sounds at varying frequencies known as whale song.

Marine biologist Philip Clapham describes the song as "probably the most complex in the animal kingdom. Male humpback whales perform these vocalizations often during the mating season, and so it is believed the purpose of songs is to aid mate selection. Singing has also been recorded in competitive groups of whales that are composed of one female and multiple males. Interest in whale song was aroused by researchers Roger Payne and Scott McVay after the songs were brought to their attention by a Bermudian named Frank Watlington who was working for the US government at the SOFAR station listening for Russian submarines with underwater hydrophones off the coast of the island.

The songs follow a distinct hierarchical structure. The base units of the song sometimes loosely called the " notes " are single uninterrupted emissions of sound that last up to a few seconds.

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