Whale Songs Decoded

Humpback songs can be heard by the human ear, but their pace is slower than ours, making it hard to recognize melody. Researchers first identified their “songs” by printing out recorded spectrograms, which show pitch and timing. Visualized as shapes, song patterns emerged. Here we’ve translated a whale song into both shapes and human musical score.

The notes above are the first segment of the whale’s song. Below we see the same segment, represented as a spectrogram translated into a visual shape of sound, to capture pitch and timing. Color distinguishes shapes and makes patterns easier to recognize: same color, same sound.

These simplified, colored musical units are joined into longer patterns to form phrases, which are then connected to construct themes. The themes are similar to individual lines of poetry or words in a song.

A SONG is a sequence of themes (labeled in our score as A through F). Humpback whale songs typically span five to 30 minutes. A whale may repeat a song many times during marathon stretches that can last up to 22 hours. Experts call these marathons SONG SESSIONS.

This humpback whale song recorded in Hawaii lasts eight minutes and two seconds. It’s made up of a series of themes (A+B+A+C+D+E+F). To better understand the complexity of its structure, we’ve drawn and colored the simplified shapes of its spectrogram to more easily distinguish patterns. Similarly, we’ve translated the simplified shapes into the human code of musical notes, so that musicians and singers can play the song themselves.

Five whales—blue, bowhead, fin, humpback, and minke—are thought to sing. Smaller whales typically produce higher frequency signals, while massive blue and fin whales can sing at pitches too low for humans to hear. Low tones can travel farthest, but reach is affected by natural ocean sounds, such as waves, and human-caused noise pollution, such as shipping. Sound travels roughly four times as fast in water as in air.