Chapter I · Deep Ocean Voiceprint

Whale Song Recognition

HUMPBACK WHALE · MEGAPTERA NOVAEANGLIAE

A humpback's song can travel hundreds of kilometers, and individuals in the same feeding ground share melodies that keep evolving. We feed real whale recordings released by NOAA and the National Park Service through a digital signal processing pipeline — Fourier transforms, mel filter banks, log spectra — and hand them to a convolutional neural network that learns the acoustic identity woven into each whale's voice.