Recording Studio: Each and every dolphin has a different sound just like you and me, a sound that other dolphins recognize as a particular individual. Even a new baby dolphin, (calf), can detect it’s mother’s whistle within the pod soon after birth. Utilizing their blowholes, air sacks and valves, dolphins can emit a very wide variety of sounds. In fact, the frequency levels range 10 times beyond what humans can hear!
This system is called “Echolocation”, or “Sonar”, just like what a submarine uses to navigate while underwater. Yet the dolphins sonar is much more advanced than human technology and can pin point exact information about it’s surroundings ranging from size, distance and even the nature of the object.
Recording Studio: Dolphin Speech
Recording Studio Dolphin Speech is so complex that the sounds even cross the species barriers and enable different kinds of dolphins to communicate. They have been known to instruct each other as well as receive instructions and act accordingly.
Recording Studio: Dolphin Ecolocation
Equivalent to sonar or radar, echolocation is the production of sound used for communication. Echolocation is the use of ultra-high frequency sounds for navigation and locating prey. Bats and marine mammals are able to use sound to “see”. It is the returning echoes that give the animal an “image” of some parts of its environment.
The echoes must be loud enough to return to the animal and short enough so that the echo of the sender returns back to the animal or human before the next one is sent out. Echolocation is used by mammals like dolphins, whales and bats.
Marine mammals also use echolocation as a means of sight. Thought to be an “Auditory Imaging System” by different species of mammals, echolocation involves the vocalisations by the echo locating mammal which detects the echoes of sounds and uses them to produce 3-Dimensional information. For example, dolphins produce sounds by squeezing air through their nasal passages beneath the blowhole. They then focus on sounds they make with their melon. The melon is a fat filled area on the dolphin’s forehead that acts like a lens to focus on sound waves ahead of the dolphins. The sound waves given are then reflected off the objects and received through the dolphin’s lower jaw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqteBewLJzk
