Whale Song Code

During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song.

The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer—the Combo Signal Recognizer (CSR)—would detect the specific patterns and decode them on the other end. In theory, this idea was relatively simple. As work progressed, the Navy found a number of complicated problems to overcome, the bulk of which centered on the authenticity of the code itself.

The message structure couldn’t just substitute the moaning of a whale or a crying seal for As and Bs or even whole words. In addition, the sounds Navy technicians recorded between 1959 and 1965 all had natural background noise. With the technology available, it would have been hard to scrub that out. Repeated blasts of the same sounds with identical extra noise would stand out to even untrained sonar operators.

In the end, it didn’t work.

Tags: espionage, history of cryptography, military

Posted on April 29, 2024 at 7:07 AM • 11 Comments

Comments

Winter • April 29, 2024 7:47 AM

In the end, it didn’t work.

It has probably already been done. There was a paper about synthesizing whale sounds in 2010 from a Korean group. If that is too old, here is how to do it now:

Generating Synthetic Sperm Whale Voice Data Using StyleGAN2-ADA
‘https://www.mdpi.com/2504-2289/8/4/40

The application of deep learning neural networks enables the processing of extensive volumes of data and often requires dense datasets. In certain domains, researchers encounter challenges related to the scarcity of training data, particularly in marine biology. In addition, many sounds produced by sea mammals are of interest in technical applications, e.g., underwater communication or sonar construction.

Synthesis and Modification of Cetacean Tonal Sounds for Underwater Bionic Covert Detection and Communication
‘https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9122519

For most conventional bionic signal design methods, they cannot construct high-similarity bionic signals to match those complex cetacean sounds because they are only based on relatively simple bionic signal models. Besides, although very few methods based on the weighted signal superposition technology can construct high-similarity bionic signals, it’s very difficult to adjust relevant parameters to match different cetacean sounds or synthesize other desired bionic signals. To solve these problems, firstly, two bionic signal models are proposed individually to mimic cetacean sounds with a simple time-frequency (TF) structure, and then they are combined to mimic cetacean sounds with complex TF structures based on a designed piecewise construction strategy.

wiredog • April 29, 2024 8:22 AM

Coding enough fixed, simplistic messages for the equipment to be truly useful might easily have been daunting task.

When I was in the Army we had a code book with lookups for various words and phrases. About an inch thick, small type, with, IIRC, 5 letter groups for each work or phrase. Different sections for each day of the month. Thousands of groups per month. Sure, they got remapped each month, but they didn’t have to sound like sensible words and phrases either.

R.Cake • April 29, 2024 9:56 AM

not that the military would care, but I think flooding the ocean with synthetic whale songs will very likely not do the whales particularly well.
I mean, just imagine this the other way round: you are sitting in your company canteen and are trying to have a sensible discussion with your colleague across the table, but there are weirdos who keep constantly yelling something across the room that is totally unintelligible to you.
Naah, please don’t.

Clive Robinson • April 29, 2024 10:43 AM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Re : More layers than you can imagine.

“In the end, it didn’t work.”

And almost certainly can not at any useful level.

All methods of communications humans have recognised and studied have certain similarities.

1, They are all layered.
2, Each layer contains corrective redundancy.
3, The actual information content compared to channel capacity is very small.
4, The layers are many and have a hierarchical dependence.

Now consider what is “information” to whales and humans has very little or no correlation.

So to take meaningful information in human terms and make it appear as natural information in whale terms has little or no probability of success.

It’s a bit like getting an AI LLM to make a fake photo/video commercial. The LLM lacks the understanding of the very many layers that humans intuitively spot. Thus you got faces with squints and other noticeable incorrect eye positions, hands with the wrong numbers of fingers, left curving feet on right legs where kegs were crossed, ears with incorrect sizing and shaping, and so on and so on.

Yes we are changing LLM’s to correct these levels. But each layer we change has a knock-on effect in other dependent layers.

You are going to get the same effect with vocal / auditory communications only worse.

Back during WWII the BBC transmitted “Messages for our friends”.

They were simple “code” substitutions, where a phrase had no meaning in of it’s self but if you looked it up in the “code book” it would point to a message. So,

“The owl and the pussycat”

When looked up in the book give,

“Prepare to attack from 2 days.”

With,

“The dog fetched the ball”

Meaning,

“Attack at dawn.”

Or similar.

As long as each message was randomly selected and only used once it had “perfect secrecy” as to the message meaning. But the fact it was a secret message was obvious to anyone who heard it thus “traffic analysis” was possible.

I could go on to describe as to why such messages are dangerous in anything other than a one way “Fleet Broadcast” type system. But most can work that out after a moments thought.

cybershow • April 29, 2024 12:24 PM

I’d like to believe I could synthesise a very lifelike whale sound
using bioacoustic modelling and use that as a carrier for quite rich
information transfer. But any even remotely sophisticated signal
analysis would spot it for what it was – a synthetic signal carrying
some data – in moments, and then for the reasons Clive mentions, the
game would be up. Sounds like the kind of caper that might just have
worked in an Enid Blyton adventure circa 1945.

Anyway here’s this week’s cybershow episode – a whopper weighing-in at
90 mins! It’s about CCTV.

It’s not closed. It’s not a circuit. And it ain’t even television.

best to you all

echo • April 29, 2024 12:56 PM

not that the military would care, but I think flooding the ocean with synthetic whale songs will very likely not do the whales particularly well.
I mean, just imagine this the other way round: you are sitting in your company canteen and are trying to have a sensible discussion with your colleague across the table, but there are weirdos who keep constantly yelling something across the room that is totally unintelligible to you.
Naah, please don’t.

That’s what I was thinking. The comments in an earlier topic on experimenting with AI to see if could be a translator for animals was intriguing though fraught with difficulties in both understanding and how we relate.

I’ve thought for a long time parliament is a magnet for busybodies and the military is a heatsink for men with too much energy. Not to take a pro or anti military stance but I think it’s interesting that across developed nations military recruitment is dropping. Following on from this people will probably scream if I mention gender studies and sociology but the military like the church of old in some respects is a patriarchal bastion and an approved way for sciencey stuff to happen. I muse about how demographic change and geopolitical change will effect this.

Maybe the military could try something easier next time like, I don’t know, a mouse organ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9nGyPz9uT0
Monty Python
Mouse Organ Sketch

Although probably not…

cybershow • April 29, 2024 3:45 PM

@echo

The OG mouse organ is featured in this sticking and mending song.

echo • April 29, 2024 4:28 PM

@cybershow

That was really lovely. Thank you!

Jon (a different Jon) • April 29, 2024 8:41 PM

Incidentally, these things still exist.

They’re called ‘numbers stations’, and broadcast on worldwide shortwave radio, merely reciting seemingly-random numbers.

Presumably a certain sequence of numbers broadcast at a certain time would make sense to a few spies, although exactly which numbers and which spies are a carefully-controlled secret.

Oh, and they manage it without bothering whales.

The OP reeks of someone who saw a big pile of government money and decided they wanted rather a lot of it for not doing much work. Much Cold War ‘research’ was like that.

ResearcherZero • April 29, 2024 10:56 PM

There are some researchers trying to decipher a little chat that they may have had with a whale ATM. It appears the whale responded to their repeated playback of certain whale-song broadcast at a defined period. Maybe they will have some luck trying to figure out if it actually responded.

I’d probably beach myself if humans began speaking to me. Whales might be more polite.

echo • April 30, 2024 4:50 PM

Gary Larson’s “Far Side” dog translator helmet cartoon is a classic. Of course dogs don’t just communicate via noise but physical signals and smells too. I guess other animals can be similar.

Whale Song Code

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