However the whale filtered the pulse from the phonic lips, it would need to involve movements at time granularities much, much smaller than even the fastest known acoustic control systems in vertebrates. This is not biologically plausible, probably even if the articulatory control in question is at the coda level and not the click level. The whales are not in control of these clicks in the way the authors suppose.
Sorry, I think you skipped some steps here, or I’m not following along correctly. Could you expand this to have more detail?
I think you’re trying to argue “the whale isn’t choosing whether it makes an ‘a’ sound or an ‘i’ sound, it’s being determined by some other factor.” But I think your argument is more like implying that it’s biologically implausible that the whales are making these sounds using just their anatomy—which I think is importantly distinct. Like:
The broadband impulse which originates from the phonic lips exits the head along a direct path and a delayed reflected path off the distal air sac. There’s a pretty detailed wikipedia page documenting this phenomenon.
What’s the argument that this can’t be under the whale’s volitional control? Like, there’s sounds that I can’t make using just my vocal cords and mouth that I can make using my vocal cords, mouth, and hands. I think for your speed argument to be relevant, you need to show that the whales are switching between sounds at a biologically implausible speed, rather than configuring their anatomy to make sound A, then reconfiguring at a biologically plausible speed, then making sound B, which I think lines up with the data presented here.
(Of course, I’m not an expert in whale sounds, and so quite plausibly you just dropped some background detail that any expert would know and I don’t. But if so, it should be easy to point to that detail.)
“I think for your speed argument to be relevant, you need to show that the whales are switching between sounds at a biologically implausible speed”. Yes, this is exactly right. Look at Fig 6 above.
The spectral pattern switches from “a” clicks to “i” clicks in at most 100 ms (there might be 30 ms between clicks and each of those click samples is 5 ms). That’s really fast. It rivals the human motor system governing our articulation. It’s ambitious to claim whales have such capabilities without detailed anatomical references that the authors don’t make.
Figure 6 doesn’t have any timing information (about the gaps between the clicks)? It just has the spectral analysis of five different clicks (which presumably form a coda). When I looked up another paper to try to figure out what codas are, it suggested that 1s is a reasonable estimate for total time, with switching happening in about 200ms, which seems plausible to me.
I think a single implausible hop should be enough to persuade me that something else is going on?
I do have some lingering confusion about whether you’re trying to establish that there’s a recording problem and the whales aren’t making the sounds that are being analyzed, or whether the whales are making the sounds but it’s somehow unintentional.
Sorry, I think you skipped some steps here, or I’m not following along correctly. Could you expand this to have more detail?
I think you’re trying to argue “the whale isn’t choosing whether it makes an ‘a’ sound or an ‘i’ sound, it’s being determined by some other factor.” But I think your argument is more like implying that it’s biologically implausible that the whales are making these sounds using just their anatomy—which I think is importantly distinct. Like:
What’s the argument that this can’t be under the whale’s volitional control? Like, there’s sounds that I can’t make using just my vocal cords and mouth that I can make using my vocal cords, mouth, and hands. I think for your speed argument to be relevant, you need to show that the whales are switching between sounds at a biologically implausible speed, rather than configuring their anatomy to make sound A, then reconfiguring at a biologically plausible speed, then making sound B, which I think lines up with the data presented here.
(Of course, I’m not an expert in whale sounds, and so quite plausibly you just dropped some background detail that any expert would know and I don’t. But if so, it should be easy to point to that detail.)
“I think for your speed argument to be relevant, you need to show that the whales are switching between sounds at a biologically implausible speed”. Yes, this is exactly right. Look at Fig 6 above.
The spectral pattern switches from “a” clicks to “i” clicks in at most 100 ms (there might be 30 ms between clicks and each of those click samples is 5 ms). That’s really fast. It rivals the human motor system governing our articulation. It’s ambitious to claim whales have such capabilities without detailed anatomical references that the authors don’t make.
Figure 6 doesn’t have any timing information (about the gaps between the clicks)? It just has the spectral analysis of five different clicks (which presumably form a coda). When I looked up another paper to try to figure out what codas are, it suggested that 1s is a reasonable estimate for total time, with switching happening in about 200ms, which seems plausible to me.
Or you’d be persuaded if they switched “a” to “i” back to “a” in biologically implausible time?
I think a single implausible hop should be enough to persuade me that something else is going on?
I do have some lingering confusion about whether you’re trying to establish that there’s a recording problem and the whales aren’t making the sounds that are being analyzed, or whether the whales are making the sounds but it’s somehow unintentional.
I’d lean toward the latter, but I just don’t think we know.