Can We 'Communicate' With Dolphins?

One of the first recorded attempts by a human to establish communication with dolphins was in the 1960s. The US Navy, along with researchers in Hawaii, devised an acoustic communication interface for that exact purpose.

The system they used was mapped to match the dolphin whistle contour with a human vowel. A computer was used to translate the combinations of human vowels to generate sinusoidal dolphin whistles. Eventually, the dolphins learned to respond to 30+ command strings given to them by humans using five-word sentence structures.

Denise Herzing, a behavioral biologist, along with a team of researchers, are trying to crack the code to communicate with dolphins as a part of the Wild Dolphin Project. For almost three decades, they have been studying dolphins and trying to establish communication with them in the shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas, just east of Florida.