Passage IV

Name That Tune

[1] Crowdsourcing, “recruiting” volunteers from the general public to help perform a task, is often an efficient means of rummaging around massive amounts of data. [2] But for the Whale Song Project, which focuses on deciphering the songs of killer and pilot whales, crowdsourcing also alleviates the problem of subjective interpretation. [3] It has been instrumental in classifying galaxies, and decoding ancient papyri.(47)

The key to learning more about the meaning of whale songs, scientists believe, is to study the songs in context. Their aim is to establish what type of situation elicits a particular song. Two pieces of sophisticated recording equipment is essential in this endeavor: D-tags and hydrophone arrays. For example, D-tags are noninvasive devices temporarily attached to the whales with suction cups. Hydrophone arrays are webs of underwater recording devices(51). Using this equipment, scientists have amassed roughly 15, 000 songs, along with other background noises and data about the whales’ locations and movements.

Now scientists are turning to crowdsourcing to meet the next challenge: tagging similar-sounding songs as matches. These matches are vital for the project, they allow scientists to identify and compare multiple situations in which the same song was recorded. The process, which effectively narrows the range of potential factors that possibly could have evoked a particular song, thereby offering better clues to the song’s meaning.

The variability in human capacity to distinguish high and low tones makes the matching process highly subjective. Crowdsourcing, however, allows scientists to nab significant trends in matchmaking rather than to work from a few listeners’ interpretations. Nevertheless, songs can be sorted more reliably. Where so much depends on identifying similarities in sounds that crowdsourcing could provide a crucial step toward understanding what the whales are saying.