Interpreting Dolphin Vocal Sequences via Multiple Sequence Alignment

Daniel Kohlsdorf; Denise Herzing; Thad Starner

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arXiv · 2609.08795

Interpreting Dolphin Vocal Sequences via Multiple Sequence Alignment

Daniel Kohlsdorf·Denise Herzing·Thad Starner

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Abstract

Dolphin communication understanding is essential for uncovering the linguistic complexity and social structures of wild pods. We adapt the ClustalW bioinformatics algorithm to analyze continuous acoustic data, treating vocalizations as high-dimensional spectral feature vectors. By replacing discrete scoring with a continuous Gaussian kernel similarity measure, our framework generates Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) visualizations that reveal shared structural patterns. These alignments highlight temporal motifs such as synchronized burst pulses in aggressive contexts that are difficult to detect through standard spectrogram inspection.

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Daniel Kohlsdorf, Denise Herzing, Thad Starner. 2026-09-08. Interpreting Dolphin Vocal Sequences via Multiple Sequence Alignment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08795

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