"Arrival" directed by Denis Villeneuve

[intrinsical]

I'm kinda disappointed with the final trailer as it seems as if the alien's verbal language has been changed into something that doesn't even sound like a language. I'm seriously hoping the sound that's played repeatedly is just part of the soundtrack and not the alien's language.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

According to the short story, the aliens' spoken language sounds like a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur. Why should it sound like a human language?

 

[intrinsical]

My background is in computational linguistics. I know there are certain properties that all languages must have because they are all ways of conveying information. As a consequence of conveying information, all languages have to obey Information Theory. It doesn't matter if its written spoken, human, dolphin, computer or alien. One property they all have to obey is Zipf's Law.

http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-sh...deos/through-the-wormhole-information-theory/

The above video shows that any language cannot be completely random. Languages also cannot be completely constant. Those are the two extreme ends that does not convey any information. Thankfully the auditory/sequential language used in the trailer isn't random nor constant, so it does convey information.

My problem with the trailer's language is that it is somewhat repetitive, It is as if a human were saying "Uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka" or "dum dum dum dum dum". As you can see, such repetitiveness conveys very little information.

 

[JD]

Whose to say that alien forms of communication would work exactly the same as human's.

 

[Christopher]

My problem with the trailer's language is that it is somewhat repetitive, It is as if a human were saying "Uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka" or "dum dum dum dum dum". As you can see, such repetitiveness conveys very little information.

Well, the former conveys the information that the speaker is hooked on a feeling...

I could imagine a language that was based on a constant "ostinato" that had some kind of modulation on top of it, sort of like a Philip Glass composition. My father was a big fan of Glass's music, which I didn't care for much because it was so repetitive. I was used to music that varied its melody and rhythm more, but my father pointed out that Glass's minimalism was based on varying other aspects of the music (the harmonies, the dynamics, the orchestration, etc.) while keeping the basic melodic/rhythmic pattern constant.

So maybe an alien language could have a constant, repetitive tone, but convey information through the variations in the overtones, say. A fundamental tone can have dozens of overtones on top of it, so you could vary them to create hundreds of different "syllables" and construct a meaningful language that way. And if most of those overtones were beyond human hearing range, say, then the alien language could just sound like a single, unvarying tone over and over.

 

[JD]

I doubt it will be the case in the movies, but in real life there's also a chance that parts of the language could be in frequencies humans can't here, like whales, elephants, or dog whistles. So all we hear is the same repetitive tone, while there are whole other parts of the sounds we don't hear.

 

[Christopher]

And if most of those overtones were beyond human hearing range, say, then the alien language could just sound like a single, unvarying tone over and over.

I doubt it will be the case in the movies, but in real life there's also a chance that parts of the language could be in frequencies humans can't here, like whales, elephants, or do whistles. So all we hear is the same repetitive tone, while there are whole other parts of the sounds we don't hear.

Speaking of repetition...

 

[Vorpal_Blade]

Looks like it might be pretty good.

 

[Tribble puncher]

Well, the former conveys the information that the speaker is hooked on a feeling...

I could imagine a language that was based on a constant "ostinato" that had some kind of modulation on top of it, sort of like a Philip Glass composition. My father was a big fan of Glass's music, which I didn't care for much because it was so repetitive. I was used to music that varied its melody and rhythm more, but my father pointed out that Glass's minimalism was based on varying other aspects of the music (the harmonies, the dynamics, the orchestration, etc.) while keeping the basic melodic/rhythmic pattern constant.

So maybe an alien language could have a constant, repetitive tone, but convey information through the variations in the overtones, say. A fundamental tone can have dozens of overtones on top of it, so you could vary them to create hundreds of different "syllables" and construct a meaningful language that way. And if most of those overtones were beyond human hearing range, say, then the alien language could just sound like a single, unvarying tone over and over.

You bring up an interesting point.....Who's to say that the sound we hear from the alien recordings would even be the part that conveys the information? (or the word part) it could just be air passing over their respiratory parts or something.....Plus from the Trailer in the Film it appears they are trying to translate the WRITTEN language...not the Audio Stuff....I think the Audio recording was played to the main character in the trailer to drive home the point of the satiation they needed her help with.

 

[intrinsical]

Just so we're all clear, here's the latest trailer that has the new alien "speech" that's mostly just a repetition with a downshift in frequency (starts at 12 second mark). In previous trailers, the same footage was attached with alien speech that sounded like a a stream of static-like sounds followed by clicking sounds.

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General Webber is asking the world's foremost expert on languages if the audio recording is a language. From this context, I presume that the military recorded from a wide range of frequencies, well beyond what humans can hear, did whatever post-processing is necessary to downsample the alien speech into human auditory range for Dr. Banks (Amy Adam's character) to analyze.

Well, the former conveys the information that the speaker is hooked on a feeling...

Yes, hooked on a feeling is the information I intended to convey. The point is, it took so many repeated words "Uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka" to convey that little bit of information when I could have said the shorter version, "Hooked on a feeling". It's barely what I would even be able to recognize as a language.

If I were in a first contact situation with a new alien species and you're trying to convey information about the song, would you say "Uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka", or would you say something like "Hooked on a feeling is a song we currently enjoy here on Earth." I guarantee you, repeating "uga chaka" would confuse every single alien. They wouldn't even know if you were speaking a language. Whereas there is no doubt language is involved in the second sentence.

I could imagine a language that was based on a constant "ostinato" that had some kind of modulation on top of it, sort of like a Philip Glass composition. My father was a big fan of Glass's music, which I didn't care for much because it was so repetitive. I was used to music that varied its melody and rhythm more, but my father pointed out that Glass's minimalism was based on varying other aspects of the music (the harmonies, the dynamics, the orchestration, etc.) while keeping the basic melodic/rhythmic pattern constant.

You still would be able to hear the overtones, the subharmonics and recognize that it is a modulated signal, that there's a weaker signal embedded in the main signal. If you've heard modems from the 1980s and 90s that modulates transmitted data on a main carrier wave, you can tell exactly when the modem is transmitting because there's a audible change in the purity of the carrier wave's sound. The carrier wave's sound becomes distorted when the modem is transmitting.

It is a fundamental fact of Information Theory. The signal won't be a completely random distribution and the signal won't be a uniform distribution as these two distributions cannot contain any information. When you are transmitting information, the signal is going to look or sound somewhat random but contains recognizable bursts of patterns. The more information the signal contains, the signal will look or sound more random although it won't ever become completely random. Ted Chiang understood this when he wrote his short story. The alien's auditory and visual visual languages will sound and look like complex fractals. The more complex the fractal, the more information there is embedded. That's how we know it is a language that is meant to convey information.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Having heard the "language" in the final trailer, I agree with your point. I doubt the Foley artist on the film was even acquainted with Shannon and Weaver or maybe the director instructed him/her to ignore the description in Ted Chiang's short story. I assume the artist in question chose a sound that has an entropy deliberately unlike that of a language for the purpose of making it seem alien to the audience. However, as you state, this flies in the face of Information Theory.

 

[Christopher]

Yes, hooked on a feeling is the information I intended to convey. The point is, it took so many repeated words "Uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka" to convey that little bit of information when I could have said the shorter version, "Hooked on a feeling". It's barely what I would even be able to recognize as a language.

I don't think the words "Uga chaka" are really found anywhere else, though, so a single iteration of them would've probably been enough.

Besides, I think you're being too literal with the analogy. After all, "Uga chaka" contains a lot more information than just "dah-dah-dah-dah-dah," because it has 4 syllables and 6 distinct phonetic sounds, including both consonants and vowels, that convey information both through their sound quality and arrangement (for instance, the fact that the a sounds different at the end of a word than in the middle). So the part that's repeating contains considerably more than a single "bit" of information. What I'm proposing is that each of the individual "beats" would have a different overtone pattern and thus constitute a tonally distinct syllable, so they wouldn't actually be a repetition of a single tone. The fundamental tone would be the same, but the harmonics would be distinct.

If I were in a first contact situation with a new alien species and you're trying to convey information about the song, would you say "Uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka, uga chaka", or would you say something like "Hooked on a feeling is a song we currently enjoy here on Earth." I guarantee you, repeating "uga chaka" would confuse every single alien. They wouldn't even know if you were speaking a language. Whereas there is no doubt language is involved in the second sentence.

The longer sentence would convey a larger sample of phonetic and linguistic information, sure, but the shorter sample would be enough to verify the existence of phonetic complexity and structure. It's definitely a more complex set of phonemes than, say, the barking of a dog or the chirping of a cricket. Obviously the aliens would need a larger sample to have a meaningful chance of deciphering the language, but yes, the short sample is complex enough to indicate that it is a fragment of a genuine language.

Let's see, you've got a close central rounded vowel (u), a voiced velar stop (g), a mid central vowel or schwa (terminal a), a voiceless palato-alveolar affricate (ch), a near-open central unrounded vowel (central a), and a voiceless velar stop (k). That's quite a lot of phonetic variation -- a small fraction of what the language is capable of, to be sure, but enough to demonstrate several different axes of variation (voiced/voiceless, rounded/unrounded, velar/palato-alveolar, affricate/stop, etc.) and thus to make it clear that the organism's vocal tract is capable of producing an even wider range of sounds by combining those options in different ways. So while those four syllables may not convey actual meanings to an alien listener, they would certainly convey enough information to allow the listener to confirm that, yes, this is a spoken language capable of conveying complex meaning, as opposed to simply an animal vocalization. And they would contain some information about how that language is structured phonetically and what other sounds it might include.

You still would be able to hear the overtones, the subharmonics and recognize that it is a modulated signal, that there's a weaker signal embedded in the main signal.

If they're in human hearing range and the reproduction is high-fidelity enough to capture them. Maybe there's more information in the sound than we could tell just from listening to it in a movie trailer -- or maybe there's fictitiously supposed to be information beyond what we can hear, even if there isn't in the actual sound created for the movie. (Like that joke in Babylon 5 where Zathras said that each of his brothers named Zathras pronounced it differently, but then the actor pronounced it identically several different times, as if the differences were so subtle to be indiscernible to the human ear.)

 

[publiusr]

My father was a big fan of Glass's music, which I didn't care for much because it was so repetitive.

I like Eno's Music for Airports myself.
His work: https://monoskop.org/images/f/f1/Tamm_Eric_Brian_Eno_His_Music_and_the_Vertical_Color_of_Sound.pdf

Spacemusic, was called "new age" (page 165-166, above)

"Most of it shares a tranquil atmosphere, a non-developmental nature, a focus on tone color as a primary element of musical expression, and a high level of unabashed diatonicism and consonance."

Of course, now it's called "Ambient."

 

[JD]

Speaking of repetition...

Sorry, missed that bit of your post.
Do we know for a fact that that is definitely exactly what it will sound like in the final movie? Couldn't they have just done the repetition for the trailer?
If it is, couldn't the information be in something other than the sounds themselves, like in the gaps between sounds or something like that?

 

[Commander Richard]

I just saw the movie. I was going to see it anyway but the fact that it's scoring an 8.5 at the IMDb and a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes got me especially interested, and I wasn't alone. I was in a packed theatre, something I haven't seen in a few years.

Anyway, the movie is fantastic. It's not a special effects extravaganza or a military shoot-em-up alien invasion story, it's partly a personal story and partly sci fi and both will leave you thinking about what you just saw and perhaps you'll even find it's ideas about language and thought fascinating. Check it out, it's gripping ride.

 

[Ethros]

Yeah just saw it this evening, really enjoyed it. Definitely a thinker and not some OTT action movie. Do have some questions and points to make but is it best for another (review?) thread? Would make one but I'm in a rush atm

 

[The Wormhole]

I don't know, this really didn't click with me. Granted, the trailers didn't actually interest me that much, my main draw was the really high rating (at one point 100%) on Rotten Tomatoes. I knew going in that it was a character piece and not necessarily about the aliens per se, that being said that plodding and drawn out reveal of the aliens was a bit weary. My biggest frustration is with the plot twist going into the ending. Without going into any spoilers, the twist is telegraphed a good forty minutes away from the ending. Granted, I didn't figure it out until a vital clue is dropped, so I won't claim it was predictable. Still, when you figure something out before the actual reveal, it is frustrating when you have to wait for the characters themselves to work it out. The twist itself didn't enthrall me either. Without giving much away, I'll paraphrase Doctor Who and say it was too "timey-wimey."

 

[Commander Richard]

^ I gradually saw what was going on too and figured out that...

Spoiler

He was the girl's father.

 

[Ethros]

I'll just use spoilers for a few points

Spoiler

I don't think I figured out he was the father or her child stuff hadn't happened yet, think I just went along with it.

Anyway, so I do get that what the film was *really* about was how even with loss it was all still worth it in the end and even though she knew what would happen it was still worth going though etc etc, the sci-fi stuff was kinda secondary. I get that, but gonna ask a question about it anyway-

So the aliens just give us all the key to their technology, and in return we have to help them in 3000 years (which to them I gather is nothing as they don't live in linear time)

But it never explained what they wanted in 3000 years? Now yeah ok, 3000 years is a frickin long time! So who cares right now. But I mean what if they were like the aliens in Torchwood: Children of Earth, and they come back and are like "yeah we want to eat all your children, thanks." Or like "hey we need you all as our slaves now, sorry guys!" It just seemed odd that if they were so technologically advanced what they wanted from us? Or did they think we could do more with the technology than they could maybe? I don't know, left me wondering. Unless maybe I missed something?

Also I know this isn't Star Trek but kinda thought how they were breaking the Prime Directive there! I'd rather we a species would be able to develop that technology on our own rather than simply being handed it by someone else.



And did anyone else think of the Prophets from DS9 with all the non-linear time stuff? Namely the pilot Emissary. Just thought it helped make sense to me, whereas say someone watching the movie fairly unfamiliar with sci-fi concepts might not have understood it as much.



Oh and yet another Star Trek point, the Chinese guy was called General Chang. Haha, I kept expecting him to say "prick us do we not bleed, tickle us do we not laugh. Wrong us... shall we not revenge!"

 

[Commander Richard]

^

Spoiler

The 3000 years bit piqued my interest too but I don't mind that they didn't follow up on it because the rest of the movie was good. Plus it's nice to speculate on what they could possibly want, something I haven't given much thought too just yet. Maybe humans have a personal trait or a drive that they lack? Like maybe we'll do a task that they aren't willing or able to do, but we still need their technological advantage to do it? I don't know.

I also came up with a Trek connection... With a few tweaks, this movie could serve as a Trek prequel about the invention of the universal translator.

Just think... Dr. Louise Banks: Uhura's hero and role model.