A Brief History

Dolphin and Whale Glyphs

A Novel Technique for Decoding Cetacean Language 

A Collaboration by John Stuart Reid and Jack Kassewitz

When Europeans first traveled to Egypt, the hieroglyphic language they found was a mystery. The splendors of Egypt were visible for all to see but with no understanding of its written word, it was not possible to gain an insight into the minds of the people who created that great civilization. In fact, their written language remained a mystery until the early 1800's when Englishman, Thomas Young and Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion discovered key components of the "primer", the keys that unlocked the code to the ancient Egyptian language.

Although we can appreciate the beauty of dolphins and whales (cetaceans), their language has remained a mystery to us throughout history.  Now, with the advent of the CymaScope, dolphin and whale sounds can be made visible.   Such visible sound patterns are called "CymaGlyphs" and we have begun to create a library of what could be thought of as the hieroglyphic language of cetaceans.  

By studying the body language and behaviors of dolphins and whales in relation to the sounds they make, we anticipate that a "cetacean primer" will emerge, and like the one that deciphered hieroglyphs, it will allow us to glimpse a once hidden world. The language of dolphins and whales may soon be unlocked. 

History of the CymaScope

John Stuart Reid's acoustic research in the Great Pyramid, in 1997, led him to investigate methods of exploring the inherent resonances in the granite sarcophagus. The novel method he employed concerned Cymatics, the emergent science in which modal phenomena can be made visible on a membrane. 

Following his successful work in the pyramid, Reid built a prototype "CymaScope" consisting of a simple latex membrane with the facility to tune its tension, excited by a conventional transducer. In 2005 he was introduced to Erik Larson who took Reid's prototype and precision engineered it, building in many enhancements. Realizing that their early work with exciting particulate media could not yield sufficient detail, they explored the use of water as the membrane. 

In its present evolutionary stage the CymaScope can make visible any sound in a bandwidth extending from 3 Hz to 1000 Hz. An experimental high frequency WaterDrive Module can extend this to 3,000 Hz. The resulting images represent an analog of the frequencies present in the sound, a kind of 'fingerprint' of a given sound, that can be photographed and videographed for close study.

New Discovery

A Novel Technique for Decoding Cetacean Language

This breakthrough technique involves making dolphin and whale sounds visible in water, possibly mimicking the very mechanisms that nature evolved in the cetaceans' own sound-receiving apparatus. Using a newly developed instrument, the CymaScope, a team led by Jack Kassewitz in the USA and John Stuart Reid in the UK aim to build a lexicon of cetacean words, each word having a specific meaning and each forming a recognizable pattern, known as a CymaGlyph.  

This novel technique is at an early stage of development but there are already signs that it is exactly what researchers have been looking for as a means of exploring cetacean language. Dolphin and whale sounds are complex and conventional sound analyzers (that provide graphical representations) have not proven to be particularly helpful. Instead of providing a graph of a particular cetacean sound, the CymaScope imprints each sound on the surface of water, rather like a fingerprint on glass. Each cetacean sound forms micro disturbances in the surface of the water that can be captured by a digital camera, creating a 'glyph' that may resemble what the dolphin or whale actually sees and recognizes in its auditory and visual cortices.