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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute.

When we think about how to represent sound visually, most of us probably picture those volume-dependent sine waves. But that’s not how John Stuart Reid pictures sound. He’s patented something called a CymaScope. And he’s using it to help us learn more about how animals like dolphins communicate.

The CymaScope contains a thin film of water—basically a membrane¹. Sound—even at frequencies humans can’t hear—is directed at the water. The water vibrates in response, and a camera records the vibration². The end result is a spherical³ image of sound patterns.

Reid is working with Jack⁴ Kassewitz, a dolphin researcher in Florida. Kassewitz has recordings⁵ of dolphins in specific situations—for instance, what he knows to be distress⁶ calls from a variety of individual animals. Those calls have been imaged by the CymaScope. Kassewitz also plans to have a number of different dolphins echolocate on a ball. He hopes that’ll give us a visual picture of how dolphins recognize a ball.

It might sound far-fetched, but Reid and Kassewitz believe these sound images will provide a library of what we might call dolphin words. Which could one day let us communicate with them with their own vocabulary.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber.