01909nas a2200145   4500008004100000022001400041245006400055210006400119260001600183300001600199490000800215520146700223100002201690856005101712       2018                        eng d  a0001-496600aMapping the phonetic structure of humpback whale song units0 aMapping the phonetic structure of humpback whale song units  cJan-09-2018  a1953 - 19540 v1443 a<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>
1 aPines, Howard, S.  uhttp://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5068541