OK, this is gonna sound a little batty. Because I’m gonna share some info about how researchers have figured out how to tell one bat signal from another.
And I don’t mean the bat signal to summon the masked crusader.
I read this very interesting article about it in Scientific American. Don’t ask me how I ended up there. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how a guy named Yossi Yovel monitored a bunch of Egyptian fruit bats for two and a half months. And he recorded the sounds they make. He called them “vocalizations.”
Mr. Yovel, and his team adapted a voice recognition program to analyze about 15,000 sounds those bats make on a daily basis (I thought bats only came out at night in scary movies). And they used an algorithm to correlate “specific sounds with specific social interactions captured via videos.” By doing all that, the team of researchers discovered that bats actually fight over food.
Who’d’ve thunk it?
But that’s not all those batty creatures talk about. Not by a long shot. And the research team classified the bat signals and found out that bats have a “much more complex language than we previously understood.”
Tell you what. I’ll share what the article shared. It said…
“Bats argue over food; they actually distinguish between genders when they communicate with one another; they have individual names, or “signature calls.” Mother bats speak to their babies in an equivalent of ‘motherease.’ But whereas human mothers raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies, mother bats lower the pitch.” And that elicits a babble response in the babies that learn to ‘speak’ specific words or referential signals as they grow up. So bats engage in vocal learning.”
(Are you impressed yet?)
Check out what else they said…
“That’s a great example of how deep learning is able to derive these patterns from [this] instrumentation, all of these sensors and microphones, and reveal to us something that we could not access with the naked human ear. Because most of bat communication is in the ultrasonic, above our hearing range, and because bats speak much faster than we do, we have to slow it down to listen to it, as well as reduce the frequency. So we cannot listen like a bat, but our computers can. And the next insight is, of course, that our computers can also speak back to the bat. [The software produces] specific patterns and uses those to communicate back to the bat colony or to the beehive, and that is what researchers are now doing.”
Maybe it’s just me.
But I see so much behind the scenes in that story. For example, a team of people were fascinated enough by technology and bat signals to actually adapt technology to study those signals. Also, a lot of planning went into the classification of those sounds. And that’s a lot of work. So, I bet they didn’t start from scratch every day.
Plus, my guess is that Mr. Yovel pursued a passion when he started the study. And that means he focused on something that really got him motivated.
And that’s a big reason why I shared all this with you. Because it shows why I developed RondaReady YOUniversity. To help young people (or not so young) pursue their passion systematically.
I’d love to talk to YOU if you’d like to find out more about how YOUniversity can help you take your passion as far as Yossi did. Book a free call, in my handy calendar below. And let’s talk soon.
Stay Ready,
Ronda