Dr Julie Oswald
Appearances
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: Playing the piano saved my life
I was working on a tool that we use to identify different species in acoustic recordings because we make a lot of underwater recordings, but we don't know what animals are producing the sounds. And different species sound quite similar to one another. So I was creating an AI tool to identify species.
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: Playing the piano saved my life
And in analyzing the recordings of all these different species from different areas, I came to realize that the same species in a different location sounds different. from one another.
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: Playing the piano saved my life
That's right. Yeah. Dolphins are what we call vocal learners. So they learn to produce the sounds that they produce. And so animals learning in one location are learning from their closest neighbors and the animals they spend time with. So they're learning slightly different to animals on the other side of the world.
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: Playing the piano saved my life
So depending on the environment that they're in, they'll learn slightly different sounds.
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: Playing the piano saved my life
Well, there might be. So the differences are quite subtle, which is why we need these AI tools to distinguish them. And we don't know exactly what the animals are picking up on, what dolphins are queuing in on, on the vocalization. So that's something that we're really trying to understand now. So we're not sure yet.