Whale Song Code

2024-04-29 11:07

The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals.

The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer-the Combo Signal Recognizer-would detect the specific patterns and decode them on the other end.

The message structure couldn't just substitute the moaning of a whale or a crying seal for As and Bs or even whole words.

The sounds Navy technicians recorded between 1959 and 1965 all had natural background noise.

With the technology available, it would have been hard to scrub that out.

Repeated blasts of the same sounds with identical extra noise would stand out to even untrained sonar operators.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/whale-song-code.html