Whales sing.
We know this because of the work of Katy Payne.
She is a scientist who began her career by living and working on the coast of Argentina.
She studied the whales that migrated along that coast.
She loved those whales.
In 1964, she took a trip to Bermuda to meet with a Navy engineer named Frank Watlington, who also loved whales.
He recorded the sounds of the ocean with microphones called hydrophones, which were tools the U.S. Navy used to listen for Soviet submarines during the Cold War.
During one of these recordings, he picked up the sound of a humpback whale.
When Payne boarded Watlington’s ship, she 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.
Payne later said, “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 kept the recordings a secret.
He was afraid whalers would use his discovery to 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 on the recordings that Payne didn’t recognize at first.
It took special ears and knowledge to find it.
She had both.
She grew up on a farm and went to college to study music and biology.
She became an acoustic biologist.
She watched and listened 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 of the sounds.
She traced them with a pencil on the paper and began to see structure, a structure that looked like rhythms and melodies.
“The whale is singing a song,” she whispered, astonished.
“Whales sing.”
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