In 1970, an album with no lyrics, no instruments, and no human voice became a widely heard environmental album. It was simply the sound of humpback whales, groaning and calling to each other out across the open ocean. These weren’t random noises, according to the landmark 1971 paper, Songs of Humpback Whales, published in the journal Science by researchers Roger Payne and Scott McVay. The two researchers called them songs: structured, repeating sequences.
A dead whale started it all
Payne's interest in whales began with a grim discovery. In the late 1960s, he heard about a dead whale on Revere Beach near Boston and drove out to see it. He found that souvenir hunters had already hacked off its tail. That meeting troubled him the rest of his days. Years later, Payne came across tape recordings made by a U.S. Navy engineer named Frank Watlington, who had been listening for Russian submarines near Bermuda when he heard strange sounds coming from deep underwater. Payne obtained copies of the tapes and found that the sounds were not random. They repeated in patterns that lasted anywhere from six minutes to over thirty minutes.
The research paper that started the science
Payne and McVay's 1971 study explained that humpback whales produce repetitive sounds in an exact order, and each population's song follows a shared, evolving structure. The research proved important enough to grace the cover page of Science magazine with illustrations showing what the structure of the song looks like, as the Center for Humans and Nature, a non-profit organization, notes. Later research by Payne and his wife at the time, Katharine Payne, showed that male humpback whales in the same ocean sing the same song at a given time, and that the song changes gradually from year to year. Katharine Payne went the extra mile to find that the longer songs have rhythmic patterns which recur after certain intervals.
