In case you don’t know, let me be the first to tell you - whales sing. I know this because of the life and work of a scientist named Katy Payne. She lived and worked on the coast of Argentina. She loved the whales that migrated along that coast.
In 1964, she took a trip to Bermuda to meet with a Navy engineer named Frank Watlington who also loved whales. He was recording with underwater microphones called hydrophones, which were tools the U.S. Navy had used to listen for Soviet submarines during the Cold War. It was during this recording that he picked up the sound of a humpback whale.
When she boarded Watlington’s ship, Payne didn’t know they’d be listening to anything. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard the sound whales make, have you?” asked Watlington. He played the sound of the humpback whale for her.
Katy would later say, “I had never heard anything like it. Oh, my God, tears flowed down my cheeks. I was just completely transfixed and amazed because the sounds are so beautiful, so powerful - so variable. They were, as I learned later, the sounds of just one animal. Just one animal.”
Up until that moment, Watlington had kept the recordings a secret. He was afraid whalers would use his discovery to help them hunt and kill whales. He gave the recording to Payne. “Go and save the whales,” he told her.
There was something peculiar about the sounds that Payne didn’t recognize at first. It took special ears and knowledge to find it. She had both. She had grown up on a farm and gone to college to study music and biology. She would become an acoustic biologist and spend her life watching and listening to elephants and whales, an amazing thing for a human being to do.
As she listened to the humpback whale, she wanted to see the sounds. She used a spectrogram to see pictures of their peaks, valleys and gaps. She traced them with a pencil on the paper and began to see a structure, a structure that looked like melodies and rhythms.
“The whale is singing a song,” she whispered.
Wow.
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