@article {53295,
	title = {Mapping the phonetic structure of humpback whale song units},
	journal = {The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America},
	volume = {144},
	year = {2018},
	month = {Jan-09-2018},
	pages = {1953 - 1954},
	abstract = {<p>The striking similarities of time-frequency spectrograms of voiced human speech and humpback whale vocalizations suggested a common targeted frequency-modulated phonetic basis. To map the sub-unit structure of humpback whale song units, a time-frequency contour segmentation, extraction, and classification procedure was developed and tested on streaming voiced human speech. When the procedure was applied to humpback vocalizations and the tone-pairs of the two most energetic \&ldquo;vocal fold\&rdquo; harmonic frequencies were plotted in x-y coordinates, the plot exhibited properties of an optimally structured Shannon \&ldquo;modem symbol constellation\&rdquo; diagram of 14 distinct sub-regions and 60 acoustically distinct sub-unit symbols. The humpback symbol constellation is structurally comparable to the tone-pair symbol constellations of English and Asian language vowels. The information entropy and plot of the humpback sub-unit symbol set\&rsquo;s cumulative probability vs. ranked frequency distribution function are nearly identical to the entropy and Zipf power law profile of the English language phoneme set. The precise specification of the sub-unit structure of more than one hundred song units analyzed to date has resulted in a three-fold expansion in the number of unique units identified in previous studies, suggesting that the \&ldquo;lexicon\&rdquo; of humpback song units is potentially much larger than cited in the literature.</p>
},
	issn = {0001-4966},
	doi = {10.1121/1.5068541},
	url = {http://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5068541},
	author = {Pines, Howard S.}
}
