Blue Whales Sing With Extreme Pitch Accuracy

24 August, 2010 at 22:21 | Posted in Nature | Leave a comment
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Variation between individuals is 1/12 of the difference between C and C sharp

By Stephanie Lam
Epoch Times Staff

Blue whales synchronize their songs’ pitch with other individuals within their population with very little difference, according to research published in July in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Dr. Roger Bland, professor of physics at San Francisco State University, and his colleagues analyzed 4,378 songs of blue whales in the eastern North Pacific population. They found that the whales all produce their “B calls”—the long “moan” specific to the population that forms the second half of their songs—at approximately 16.02 Hz, which is four octaves below middle C.

The variation between individuals’ calls was extremely small, at only 0.5 percent. The pitch difference between C and C sharp is 6 percent.

“Blue whales in a given population have been observed to align their pitch to a common value, but we have now been able to determine just how accurately they are able to do so,” said Dr. Bland in a press release.

The researchers think that the whales’ extreme pitch accuracy can help them locate others, because when the source of a sound is moving toward or away from an individual, the individual will hear a change in pitch.

To read the research paper, please visit http://bayacoustics.sfsu.edu/rtcpier/html/pubtalk/jasa2010/JASMAN1281490_1.pdf

viaBlue Whales Sing With Extreme Pitch Accuracy | Epoch Times

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What a Meeting in the Berry Forest!:-)

24 August, 2010 at 22:14 | Posted in Funny things :-) | Leave a comment
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Out picking berries, meeting a bear… The cool Swedish man from the north of Sweden says with a calm voice: “Take it easy now, take it easy now”. If it would have happened to me… Well I can tell you: In Sweden we say “have the bear shivers”, that would have happened to me :-)

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