Humpback whale songs have been the center of curiosity of researchers since the 1960s. Katy Payne, researcher in acoustic biology at Cornell Lab of Ornithology, together with her husband, Roger, decoded the eerie but captivating sounds to actually be music. In fact, it is not just any ordinary song but it is a song which evolves.
First, it is only male humpbacks which can sing. Males in a group tend to sing the same song in the same way, more or less. They recognize their song and can hear it from miles and miles away.
She also observed that over time it would evolve. From a group song with just six elements, over the course of two years, it became 14 elements.
It is fascinating to know that whales can compose songs as a group. She analyzed the recorded audio and ran them through spectrograms to get a visual representation. She quickly noticed the visual peaks, valleys, and gaps which looked very much melodies and rhythms.
The key factor here is the obvious intelligence that it takes to make these evolving songs. They are not random sounds. The song progressed over time to become this complicated tune. And this is only one group of whales that they observed. For sure, there are many other song kinds and patterns that we have only begun to understand.
The researcher says that is possible that these songs are linked to sexual attraction. Singing songs to attract a mate is a classic case but the true complexity of whale songs has yet to be discovered. In terms of musical structure, Payne shares that, “It's sort of like jazz where each player riffs on the same methodical repetition, but innovates too.”
Check out the full article here and take a listen to one song here:
