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Scientists working to decode birdsong

Language is said to make us human. What if birds talk, too?

computational linguist, about birds, he argued that “they’re not trying to say anything in the sense of James Joyce trying to say something.” Still, he and Kleindorfer both pointed out that humans and songbirds share a trait that many animals lack: we are “vocal learners,” meaning that we can learn to make new sounds throughout our lives. Van Horn recalls them telling him and his colleagues, “in the nicest possible way, ‘Look, guys—this data set is quaint and poorly constructed, and the species that you chose to study make no sense. ), a nonprofit dedicated to “using artificial intelligence to decode non-human communication.” E.S.P.’s current efforts examine such species as zebra finches, crows, and beluga whales, but its early work has been preoccupied with preliminary challenges: the “cocktail-party problem” of picking up individual sounds in a noisy environment; how to correlate particular noises with the precise contexts in which they occur.

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