Ramedia Technologies · A 52-week field record

An attempt to speak with sperm whales.

Whail is a wearable communication device for one of the most acoustically expressive species on the planet. We are three engineers, building it on Sundays, for one year. We have never done this before — and we are documenting every step, the boring ones included.

Open Spine V1 → Read the dispatches
01
The Premise

Codas, clicks, and a hypothesis we owe a year to.

Sperm whales communicate in short bursts of clicks called codas. Recent science has shown these aren’t random — there is a 156-type alphabet, with structure that looks suspiciously linguistic. The inter-click intervals carry the meaning.

WHAIL is our attempt to build a small wearable that can listen to a sperm whale, recognize the coda it is producing, and — eventually, responsibly, offshore — respond.

We are unlikely to succeed in the way that phrase suggests. We are very likely to learn things by trying.

Build the thing. Then build a story about having built it. Then build the next thing.
02
The Four Acts

Fifty-two Sundays, in four movements.

Act I · Weeks 1–12

Listening

Understand the science. Stand up a software loop that can ingest sperm whale audio and identify coda types from public corpora.

You are here · Wk 3
Act II · Weeks 13–30

The Build

Wearable form factor. Hydrophone selection. Embedded compute. Port the classifier to hardware that can survive a brackish afternoon.

Not yet
Act III · Weeks 31–46

The Water

Coastal and near-shore trials. Real environments, real noise. The bench-to-ocean reality check that makes or breaks the project.

Not yet
Act IV · Weeks 47–52

The Attempt

An offshore playback-and-listen experiment in the canyons off NJ/NY, under advisement of a marine acoustician. Then an honest film about what happened.

Not yet
03
Dispatches

What we’ve actually done so far.

  1. Wk 3 · 2026-06-07
    Plan locked. Site live.
    Act I is now four sub-phases over twelve Sundays. The first thing we ship — a working audio-to-coda-type pipeline — is three Sundays away. Stack chosen (Python + uv + librosa + scikit-learn). Roles named. The site you’re reading went up today.
  2. Wk 2 · 2026-05-31
    Three weeks of footage, no code yet.
    Tripod-locked Sundays, b-roll, conversation. The raw pile that becomes the year’s content. Discovered, accurately, that filming is not building.
  3. Wk 1 · 2026-05-24
    A premise the three of us could sign.
    Wearable communication device. Sperm whales. 52 weeks. Sundays only. Honest documentation. Everything downstream of that.
  4. Wk 4 · forthcoming
    First end-to-end audio loop.
    Public corpus loaded. One coda visualized. A pipeline that runs, even badly.
A Ramedia Technologies project

Whail is the story. The integration pain is the lesson.

Hydrophones, signal processing, embedded compute, on-device ML, ops — all on a Sunday budget. The reason we are doing this in public is because the integration is what makes Ramedia useful to clients on the other six days of the week.

info@ramedia.dev →