Roger Payne, who has died of cancer aged 88, was a vital force in the struggle to “save the whale”. During the 20th century, an estimated 3 million great whales were hunted to furnish humans with oil, meat and rose fertiliser. Payne gave a voice to an animal that had hitherto been regarded as dumb – one with a deep register that was, as he described it, a sound as big as the ocean itself.
When Payne released whale sounds in 1970 as a vinyl LP, Songs of the Humpback Whale, the album sold 125,000 copies and eventually reached multi-platinum sales. It was followed in 1979 by a flexi-disc of the sounds that was included with 10.5m copies of National Geographic magazine. The effect was akin to Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book of 1962, Silent Spring. The sounds were strange and otherworldly: they seemed like a lament, a threnody for the animals’ plight. In fact they were a demonstration of another species’ culture: a voice, not a noise.
These discrete sounds supplied the album tracks for Songs of the Humpback Whale. The titles – Solo Whale, Slowed-Down Solo Whale, Tower Whales, Distant Whale, Three Whale Trip – reverberated through the alternative culture of the time. “The world is ‘turning on’ to whales,” the liner notes declared.
Breaching gloriously on the album’s front cover, the humpback whale became the icon of a new environmental awareness, coinciding with the new images of Earth as a blue planet seen from outer space, and prompting the formation in 1971 of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Without Payne’s recordings, it has been claimed, there would not have been the political will to implement the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act in the US – although Payne’s colleague Scott McVay noted that the drastically falling populations of over-hunted whales were a more cynical reason for the cessation.
Nevertheless, whales had entered pop culture, no longer the fearsome beasts of Moby-Dick. Judy Collins used the sounds in her plaintive recording of the Scottish folk song Farewell to Tarwathie (1970). In 1977 the calls were loaded on to the Voyager probes and sent into outer space. And when David Bowie made love as an alien in Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), it was to the song of a humpback whale.
Payne was born in Manhattan, New York, son of Elizabeth (nee Searle), a music teacher, and Edward Payne, an engineer. As an undergraduate at Harvard University he worked on the directional sensitivity of the ears of bats. In 1960 he married Katharine Boynton, a zoologist. He received a doctorate at Cornell University in 1961 for his studies of owls’ abilities to find prey in the dark, and in 1966 was appointed assistant professor at Rockefeller University, New York, and a research zoologist at the Institute for Research in Animal Behavior, run by the university jointly with the New York Zoological Society.
A serious amateur cellist, Payne was attuned to the possibilities of natural “music”. In 1967, intrigued by whale sounds recorded by William Schevill of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Cape Cod, Payne and his wife travelled to Bermuda to hear them for themselves. There they met Dr Frank Watlington of the Palisade Sofar Station, who had chanced on the songs when working for the US Navy on a sonic array designed to monitor the movements of Soviet submarines.
Amazed at what he recorded, Watlington had kept his discovery confidential, worried it might be used by whaling fleets to hunt whales. He gave nearly a decade’s worth of audiotapes to the Paynes. Having read McVay’s paper, The Last of the Great Whales, in Scientific American in 1966, the Paynes then shared the tapes with him, and he used his extraordinary expertise with spectrograms to analyse the sounds in visual graphs akin to musical scores.
Using a hydrophone (an underwater microphone), the Paynes made many recordings off Bermuda – the model for Shakespeare’s isle of strange noises in The Tempest. Humpback song reverberates through the ocean’s skin; it doesn’t just broadcast below. It is a haunting experience, as the Paynes found. “Far from land, with a faint breeze and a full moon, we heard these lovely sounds pouring out of the sea,” Payne wrote. The Paynes and McVay discovered there were several song types. The songs could last for up to 29 hours and evolved over time, gradually changing each year.
In 1971 Payne and McVay published the paper that gave the scientific basis for their work. McVay recalled how he and his wife, Hella, a mathematician, realised that the six octaves were repeated in stanzas, like birdsong. “We drove to the place where the Paynes lived, and laid out the evidence,” McVay recalls. “Roger asked, ‘Are you going to publish this?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Could I publish it with you?’” McVay agreed. “I said ‘Yes, and you can be the senior author, since you seem likely to make this your life.’”
Appearing in the journal Science, the report declared that “humpback whales emit a series of surprisingly beautiful sounds”. The mere inclusion of “beauty” in a rigorous study seems now one of the most revolutionary statements Payne and McVay made.
Payne went on to have “a very prominent (if largely non-traditional) career as a whale scientist”, the Princeton historian of science D Graham Burnett noted. Hal Whitehead, now a pre-eminent whale scientist, who studied with the Paynes’ “whale laboratory” in the late 70s, described it as an “extraordinarily creative hub”.
Payne authored or co-authored dozens of scientific papers, gave hundreds of lectures, made countless television programmes and films, and led 100 oceanic expeditions.
As CEO of Ocean Alliance, founded in 1971, he furthered his cause with political agitation. I met him in New Zealand in 2010, with his second wife, the actor Lisa Harrow, whom he had met at a conservation rally in London in 1991 (his first marriage having ended in divorce) and married that year. Over dinner (no animal protein, of course), he seemed to me a charismatic man, still possessed of radical, almost teenage energy in his 70s, not least in his support of Sea Shepherd’s piratical anti-whaling interventions with Japanese whalers.
Latterly he lived in rural idyll at South Woodstock, Vermont, where the film-maker Tom Mustill visited him in 2020, describing the encounter in his recent book How to Speak Whale. “I felt I was in the presence of a benevolent wizard,” Mustill said. Payne had embarked on an ambitious new project: the Cetacean Translation Initiative, a coalition of scientists using new technology to interpret what whales might be “saying”.
His last public act was to publish a final plea in Time magazine, five days before he died. In it he called for his fellow scientists to “acknowledge the bitter truth” and to “set aside our security … to change all human behaviours that are contributing to the destruction of life, and to change them right down to their deepest roots”.
Payne is survived by Lisa, four children, John, Holly, Laura and Sam, from his first marriage, a stepson, Timothy, and 11 grandchildren.
• Roger Searle Payne, biologist and environmentalist, born 29 January 1935; died 10 June 2023
