Technology usually distracts us from nature. But now technology is “offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” wrote professor Karen Bakker in her new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.
All around the animal kingdom, there are sounds that we struggle to pick up and decipher. Elephants, for example, communicate with each other using infrasound, a sound frequency far below our human hearing range. Coral in the ocean also communicates with each other through sound waves, with one purpose being to attract baby coral to areas where it can successfully grow.
This is a shocking fact as coral doesn’t have any ears! Scientists have placed listening devices in these environments to pick up sounds humans are normally unable to detect.
After the sounds are recorded, AI is then able to determine their meaning, according to the news website Vox. There are now whole databases of whale songs and honeybee dances. Bakker wrote that one day this information could be turned into “a zoological version of Google Translate”.
One animal language Bakker wrote about is that of the elephant. She explained how elephants “have a different signal for honeybee, which is a threat, and a different signal for human,” in an interview with Vox. “Moreover, they distinguish between threatening humans and non-threatening humans,” she said.
This technology can not only understand the animals, but also communicate back to them. For example, bees use dances to communicate to their peers where to go in search of nectar. A research team in Germany, therefore, fed the bee language AI database system into a robot bee, allowing the robot to create a dance routine that can tell the bees which direction to move, Vox reported. Whereas in the past language creation had been limited to mainly apes, with there being many examples of chimpanzees (黑猩猩) having been taught sign language to communicate with humans, this new technology now allows humans to socialize with different animals throughout the animal kingdom.
8. What does the underlined word “decipher” most probably mean in paragraph 2?
A.Understand. | B.Hear. | C.Produce. | D.Record. |
9. What helps baby coral choose their home?
A.Infrasound. | B.Sounds within human range of hearing. |
C.Sounds through its ears. | D.Sound waves. |
10. What can we infer from the passage?
A.Bees used dances to warn their peers of danger. |
B.Human fed listening devices into coral to detect it. |
C.Elephants have different signals for different purposes. |
D.Elephants can tell whether there are threatening animals around. |
11. Why did researchers create the robot bee?
A.To collect more bee dances. | B.To convey direction to bees. |
C.To learn the language of bees. | D.To help bees search for their friends. |