Shannon-Zipf comparison of human and humpback whale voiced phonetic and sub-unit complexity

Abstract

The striking similarities of time-frequency spectrograms of voiced human speech and humpback whale vocalizations indicated a common targeted, frequency-modulated phonetic/sub-unit basis. To map the sub-unit structure of voiced humpback whale song units, a time-frequency-log-power contour segmentation, extraction, and classification procedure was tested on voiced human speech and then applied to humpback vocalizations. When the extracted “target” tone-pairs of the two most energetic “vocal fold” harmonic frequencies were plotted in x-y coordinates and subjected to cluster analysis, the plot exhibited properties of a Shannon-Hartley-compliant “modem symbol constellation” diagram of 14 distinct tone-pair and single-tone sub-regions. The humpback voiced symbol constellation is structurally comparable to the Peterson-Barney, F1 vs F2, formant mapping of English language vowels. The humpback’s core set of 14 fixed-pitch sub-units is augmented by numerous intra- and inter-sub-regional pitch-varying transitions similar to the generation of Asian language tonal vowels. The information entropy and plot of the humpback’s complete 65-sub-unit symbol-set’s cumulative probability versus 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 units referenced to their constituent sub-unit symbol-codes has enabled the compilation of an “alphabetic-lexicon” of voiced humpback song units.The striking similarities of time-frequency spectrograms of voiced human speech and humpback whale vocalizations indicated a common targeted, frequency-modulated phonetic/sub-unit basis. To map the sub-unit structure of voiced humpback whale song units, a time-frequency-log-power contour segmentation, extraction, and classification procedure was tested on voiced human speech and then applied to humpback vocalizations. When the extracted “target” tone-pairs of the two most energetic “vocal fold” harmonic frequencies were plotted in x-y coordinates and subjected to cluster analysis, the plot exhibited properties of a Shannon-Hartley-compliant “modem symbol constellation” diagram of 14 distinct tone-pair and single-tone sub-regions. The humpback voiced symbol constellation is structurally comparable to the Peterson-Barney, F1 vs F2, formant mapping of English language vowels. The humpback’s core set of 14 fixed-pitch sub-units is augmented by numerous intra- and inter-sub-regional pitch-varying transitions s...