OpenWhistle: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Dataset and Benchmark of Bottlenose Dolphin Vocalizations

arXiv:2609.34839 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-28 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-28

Updated: 2026-09-28

Comments: Accepted as a Spotlight at the NeurIPS 2026 Datasets & Evaluations Track

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Recent advances in bioacoustics have been driven by large-scale corpora and standardized benchmarks, yet existing resources are overwhelmingly bird-centric and shallow per species, limiting their use

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Abstract

Recent advances in bioacoustics have been driven by large-scale corpora and standardized benchmarks, yet existing resources are overwhelmingly bird-centric and shallow per species, limiting their use for studying the structure of a single species' communication system. This gap is particularly acute for cetaceans: despite bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) being a compelling case of complex vocal communication among non-human mammals, existing dolphin datasets are small, fragmented, and largely closed. We introduce OpenWhistle, the largest publicly available dataset of dolphin vocalizations. It comprises approximately 180,000 whistles (114 hours) recorded over five years from a stable pod of five individuals in a semi-natural environment, paired with a curated subset of 8,354 expert-annotated whistles and reproducible evaluation protocols for whistle-type detection and classification. We further release the full processing pipeline for whistle detection, segmentation, and categorization. To demonstrate its utility, we pretrain a Wav2Vec2.0 model adapted to dolphin acoustics on the OpenWhistle corpus and show that it learns effective representations, outperforming general-purpose bioacoustic models such as AVES and BioLingual on both tasks while leaving meaningful headroom for future work. By releasing the dataset, pipeline, and evaluation protocol, we provide the first open dolphin whistle dataset tailored for training self-supervised models, laying the groundwork for advancing dolphin communication research and developing models that capture fine-grained acoustic structure within species.

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