Whale songs are some of the most hauntingly beautiful and bizarre noises in the world. But if it hadn’t been for acoustic biologist Katy Payne, we’d probably still be dismissing them as mere sounds — like the noises our own cats and dogs make when they’re hungry, frightened, interested, or affectionate. Payne, however, realized that whales are actually composing songs, not just making noise under the sea, and moreover, she found that over time, whales change their tune. These majestic marine mammals interact with each other to create songs of escalating length and complexity over the years, in what one might compare to jazz riffing or Indigenous Australian songlines, the cultural, social, and physical maps passed down through generations.
Whale songs are some of the most hauntingly beautiful and bizarre noises in the world. But if it hadn’t been for acoustic biologist Katy Payne, we’d probably still be dismissing them as mere sounds — like the noises our own cats and dogs make when they’re hungry, frightened, interested, or affectionate. Payne, however, realized that whales are actually composing songs, not just making noise under the sea, and moreover, she found that over time, whales change their tune. These majestic marine mammals interact with each other to create songs of escalating length and complexity over the years, in what one might compare to jazz riffing or Indigenous Australian songlines, the cultural, social, and physical maps passed down through generations.
Payne’s discoveries, and ongoing research into the subject, reveal the value of cross-disciplinary collaborations. She didn’t start out with an interest in biology: She was a music major with a biology minor, focusing primarily on developing her skills in the area of music. Ultimately, that ended up turning out to her advantage, however, because when she started listening to whale vocalizations, she began identifying them as songs. She could recognize individual whales, the harmonies they made with each other, changes in tone, pitch, and speed, the use of a variety of musical elements, and, critically, the shift in songs over time as whales lengthened and changed their compositions. The scientific community was skeptical at first, forcing her and her husband out in the wilds to compile hours of whale song for study and comparison to prove their point.
Her research helped to improve our understanding of whales and the way they interact with each other. It also illustrated that activities we often consider exclusively human aren’t so unique after all; whales have a sense of aesthetics and they compose collaborative songs with meticulous care. Like their avian counterparts, they’re singing to communicate, but also to create something beautiful. Some bird species, for example, have singing competitions, with females selecting the best singers as their mates, making it key to get an edge on other members of the flock. Likewise, researchers suspect that whales may similarly be competing with each other for the attention of the women among them, as singing appears to be a strictly male activity among species like humpbacks.
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Whale image via Shutterstock.
