In 1967, the discovery of humpback whale songs by biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay caused a change in public perception. Having long been considered “gigantic and mysterious monsters,” as Herman Melville described them, whales suddenly showed their face as gentle, intelligent and moving creatures.
Payne and McVay revealed that male humpback whales produce complex vocalizations with repeated “themes” that can last up to 30 minutes, which Payne described as a “lush, uninterrupted river of sound.” When commercial whalers were killing tens of thousands of whales a year, for everything from margarine to food, Payne realized the world needed to hear their songs.
Underwater Life Songs Album
In 1969, Whales and Nightingales was released, which went gold in 1970. Capitol Records also released Songs of the Humpback Whale, which remains the best-selling nature voices album of all time. Millions of people were captivated, and the “songs” helped inspire a Greenpeace campaign.
The International Whaling Commission banned commercial hunting in 1966, and in 1986, that of all baleen whales (which also sing) and sperm whales, a moratorium that is still in force.
Many other species of cetaceans have not had the same luck, such as the North Atlantic right whale and the Western Pacific gray whale.
Although their commercial capture was prohibited in 1986 in all member countries of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), some of them, such as Japan and Norway, continue to hunt them, arguing for scientific and cultural purposes.
These are songs of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) recorded in the Western Antarctic Peninsula:
And here’s a longer recording of humpback whales in the Dominican Republic’s Silver Bank, a submerged limestone plateau where thousands of whales congregate each winter:
Bowhead whales or bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) produce a wide repertoire and changing tone, which makes this melody unique in the animal kingdom.
This is a song by one of the Spitsbergen whales:
The following is an example of a blue whale song, captured by a low-frequency hydrophone in the Cascadia Basin of northwestern North America. Since blue whales sing at such low frequencies, below the range of human hearing, the audio has been sped up by a factor of 10 to make it audible:
Finally, we share a 52 hertz recording of the whale, which has been sped up so that human ears can perceive the sound: