The

The Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewaq people, impressive day in Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author

narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

What might it mean to understand the language of sperm whales. If we could translate the vocabulary of

their echolocating cliques, what whale memories, stories, opinions, griefs might become known

to us. What would we do with these translations? And if we could, would we try and speak back?

What would or should we say, if anything?

These questions are no longer relegated to the realm of science fiction.

Project SETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, is using breakthroughs in AI and language

translation to process and potentially interpret sperm whale communication.

By analyzing massive data sets of whale recordings, researchers are beginning to isolate distinct language units,

building what could be a syntax of vocabulary for whale speech.

This episode is another held as part of our ongoing collaboration between emergence and

Moth, or the more than human rights program.

I'm joining conversation by Moth founder and legal scholar Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito,

who is working with SETI to create a set of ethical and legal

guardrails around using machine learning to understand animal communication. James Bridle, author,

artist and technologist, whose work in part explores the possibilities within more than human

intelligences. An award-winning non-fiction writer Rebecca Giggs,

...