“Surely the Divine is present in this place, and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16)[1]
Jacob, awakening from a vivid dream about a ladder between heaven and earth, realizes that unbeknown to him, Divinity was present in the place he had camped for the night. Jacob learns that his assumptions are incorrect as he experiences a life-changing moment.
It is only in the instant when Jacob is surprised that he discovers something new and unexpected.
We, unlike Jacob, are over-preparers. We endlessly watch YouTube videos and ask AI app assistants before we do things. We complete advanced degrees, listen intently to talking heads and read expert op-ed columnists. In our heart of hearts, we, maybe like Jacob, believe that previous experience is a reliable guide and that novel experiences will affirm what we already know. Our assumptions can cloud as well as inform our judgment. Like Jacob, we make assumptions that prove to net partial truths. It is only in the instant when Jacob is surprised that he discovers something new and unexpected.
If our immediate surroundings can startle us, we should be able to discern that we are notably different from other species and each of them from us. Yet we apply assumptions based upon human behavior to other life forms, and these limit our understanding. Whales, a species that has long captured the human imagination (as readers of Moby Dick or participants on whale watches can attest) provide a case in point. When whales majestically rise above the surface of the sea, causing a tremendous swell of waves, they astonish us. We are enthralled by whales.
Humpback whales, in particular, have been a source of contemporary fascination because of their sonic expression. These are a species of whales that lack teeth to chew food but instead use the “baleen” curtain-like structures within their jaws to strain food out of the ocean water.[2] Humans began to take special notice of these whales upon the release of “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” a 1970 Capitol Records album by animal behavior researcher Roger Payne.[3] The recordings had been made in 1964 by U.S. Navy engineer Frank Watlington, whose prior decade of underwater recordings sought to detect submarines. They were then interpreted as whale vocalizations three years later by Payne. The sounds were particularly startling because it required recordings to render them accessible to a human listening audience. The recordings were experienced as uncanny cries from the depths of the sea, familiar in their seeming emotionality while radically different than human vocalizations. Acoustic biologist Katy Payne, partner in research and life to Roger, recalls:
We were just completely transfixed and amazed because the sounds are so beautiful, so powerful — so variable. They were, as we learned later, the sounds of just one animal. Just one animal.[4]
The release of “Songs of the Humpback Whale” contributed to an increase in public awareness about these animals, giving rise to the movement to ban whaling. During this same period, the 1970s, musicians began to engage in oceanic musical “dates” with whales, using hydrophones to hear their sounds and to project underwater whale-like sounds and phrases played on music instruments. Some of the more prominent examples, invited by researcher Paul Spong, included saxophonist Paul Winter (playing with orcas), clarinetist David Rothenberg and flutist Paul Horn. Rothenberg describes an experience he had off the coast of Hawaii as a form of dialogue:
[It was] a music like none I’ve ever heard before … [during] one several-minute interchange, it appears that the whale and I do get through to each other. As the duet continues, I hear that the whale makes use of the spaces between my phrases, filling them in with patterns from his repertoire that at times seem to echo the pitches and timbre that I am playing. He leaps from his low beats and inserts his shrieks just when space allows …[5]
Other sea-going musicians found that the whales were less responsive to human musical sounds. Paul Winter describes his interactions as “communing,” not “communicating”:
Communicating I have no idea about; that implies some meaning. … It’s enough for me to just be there in the space and commune with sounds …
Winter appreciated listening and cohabiting sonically, but he chose to focus on creative work on the border of education and advocacy:
If I’m able to convey to people anything about the wonder of the wild creatures — and about their plight — I think I’ll do it with their sounds, because it’s the closest thing to the spirit of those creatures that you can experience short of being with them … [6]
The scholarly interpretation of these sounds was influenced by Katy Payne’s realization (she was also a musician) that these were structured in a manner that could be understood as melodic musical phrases. She viewed the patterns on spectrograms, visual representations of the sounds. This highlighted her understanding of what she had heard. Roger Payne termed the sequences “songs,” borrowing a term used by songbird researchers. The sounds of humpback whales and songbirds seemed to each display organized musical structures (patterns or sequences) found in some human music.[7]
Upon this discovery, it seemed obvious that the “songs” of humpback whales were deeply “musical,” a word that humans use to describe our own sonic expression. The radical differences between whale sounds and forms of human musical expression — or songbirds —seemed less important at the time. Yet the differences are actually substantive; analogies may confuse more than clarify. Our assumptions can, like Jacob lying down to sleep during his travels, lead him to miss what only became obvious upon awakening.
When we seek to understand forms of expression, context matters tremendously. What whales and humans are each able to hear — the frequency ranges within which each species perceives sound — completely differ, and so are the mediums through our respective sounds are projected and experienced (in the air versus under the sea). The scale in volume of our respective sounds radically differs, as environmental scholar and musician David Dunn comments about humpback whales:
When you think of what the sounds these creatures are making, and the scale and the size of that when you hear a humpback whales breach, coming out of the water, or when they’re doing their tail or pectoral fin slapping against the water. Above water, it’s very, very loud; below water, it’s like gunshots and cannon blasts. And this is the communicative thing that they’re doing.[8]
These differences reflect what I referred to in a previous Evolve essay as the umwelt, the “specie specific world” as defined by Jakob von Uexküll in 1909, a reality that is “fully comprehensible only from the perspective of the particular lifeform whose world it is.”[9] Every species adapts to its specific umwelt; its physical anatomy plays a key role in how sound is produced, while humans sit or stand on land, birds perch in trees or posts, or whales swim under the depths of an ocean or bay. The consequences with respect to sonic expression are unique to and differentiate each species.
It should not be surprising that scientific hypotheses point to distinct functions served by each individual species’ sonic expression. For songbirds, singing often seems to relate to mating behavior, although the sheer inventiveness of some species exceeds what might be useful. The functions served by human music-making are too complex and varied to suggest generalization. The function or meaning of whale sounds has proved difficult to adequately assess.
Computational scientists studying sperm whale communication recently turned to AI language models in search of spelling and grammatical structures that might bear concrete linguistic meaning.[10] [11] Dunn cautions us to consider how the latter approach “biases researchers in terms of human language structures.” Dunn adds that when anthropologist Gregory Bateson, briefly director of a dolphin research laboratory in Hawaii, found dolphin communication more similar to human music than to human language, “he didn’t mean that literally.” Bateson was searching for a metaphor more apt than linguistic meaning to help conceptualize what he observed.
Like Bateson, researchers often use the word music as a metaphor to better understand and compare species. But maybe the search to understand sonic expression cannot be learned through a human lens. Our metaphors may lead us too far afield. An important example is the use of the term “song” as a universal metaphor for humpback whale and songbird sounds. One cannot even generalize human music under the banner of “song.” This usage by music streaming services conflates how the public understands the word rather than offering clarity. Dunn reminds us that a “song” consists of a “very specific combination of human language, often text, with a melodic contour or harmonization or some kind of accompaniment that has an expressive characteristic … .” The drone-like, timbral shifting throat music of Tuvan culture cannot be called a “song,” Symphonies and string quartets are similarly not understood as “songs” because their structures are different in kind.
It is difficult to draw analogies between what we call human music and humpback whale “songs.” Few comparisons can be made between the brevity of a hit single on a human pop chart with the duration of a humpback whale “song” lasting eight to 16 minutes and sometimes approaching a half hour.[12] Unlike a lengthy human symphony or opera, humpback whale “songs” are shared in common by an entire population and articulated by individual whales spread across vast distances. They are often repeated for hours on end, showing gradual changes over time until being replaced by a new shared “song.” Imagine if our human collective musical expression consisted of but one single anthem shared by an entire population and sung only by individual people. All told, any unified meaning of the term “song” is of limited use even as a metaphor. Maybe the assumptions we make that are based upon human experience interfere with our appreciation of the radical differences that distinguish our respective species.
It is likely that human beings have always been students of the sounds of animals and the natural world. Human musical expression may be partially rooted in a primordial legacy of close listening and imitation of nature’s sounds and rhythms. Environmentalist Paul Shepard suggests that our early ancestors or forerunners appropriated patterns of sonic and other phenomena they discovered in their environment:
“music may have been already there when we arrived, and its performance was everywhere audible and visible … [Animals] mimicking, and otherwise seeking to comprehend and anticipate each other … set the stage and the terms of our presence …” [Human song may have reflected] “the mimicry of animals, the rustle of plants, the consonants of wind and water.”[13]
Before we project our assumptions onto animals, maybe we should consider what we can learn about our own sonic histories as a species. In this way, we can awaken from a dream like Jacob’s and discover truths we missed regarding our own reality.
Maybe the assumptions we make that are based upon human experience interfere with our appreciation of the radical differences that distinguish our respective species.
We can also engage sonically with humpback whales and other species within those species’ own realm, with caution lest we disrupt those realms, even though our experience of their environment will necessarily be limited. We cannot enter another species’ umwelt, but maybe we can reach toward it. Here, Martin Buber may be of assistance. If we engage with other creatures without preconceived assumptions, testing through what shared experience we may intuit — sound being a source of commonality — we may experience some kind of meeting place. This is a domain that improvising musicians know well, a context in which listening, offering, probing, following creates a flexible context in which, returning to David Dunn,
We can be co-witnesses to something and begin to create something that’s unique to the circumstance. It comes out of some emergent property, the interaction rather than something we assume a priori that we’re somehow going to translate … that’s where I think music can be fruitful as metaphor.
Sharing and receiving sounds may be the closest we can come to gaining knowledge that requires encounter but may net less empirical information. This is not a comfortable space for humans to “inhabit,” acknowledging with humility the limits to what we can know for certain.
[1] Source: Sefaria, drawn from The Contemporary Torah, JPS, 2005, with emendation by this author.
[2] Other baleen whales include fellow, blue, fin, right and gray whales. Odontoceti, “toothed” whales, porpoises, dolphins, belugas, killer and sperm whales, chew their food.
[3] The album was re-released by Paul Winter’s Living Music label in 2015. One of the subsequent recordings of humpback whales that have been commercially released is David Rothenberg and Michael Deal’s “New Songs of the Humpback Whale” (Important Records, 2014.
[4] Bill McQuay and Christopher Joyce, “It Took a Musician’s Ear To Decode the Complex Song in Whale Calls” NPR radio interview, Aug. 6, 2015. http://www.npr.org/2015/08/06/427851306/it-took-a-musicians-ear-to-decode-the-complex-song-in-whale-calls. Accessed Oct. 28, 2017.
[5] David Rothenberg, “Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound.” New York: Basic Books, 2008. Also see David Rothenberg, “Interspecies Improvisation,” George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 500-522.
[6] Paul Winter, concert program notes from a 1982 Princeton University performance.
[7] Katie Payne, Peter L. Tyack, and Roger Payne, “Progressive Changes in the Songs of Humpback Whales
(Megaptera novaeangliae): A Detailed Analysis of Two Seasons in Hawaii,” Roger Payne, ed., Communication and
Behavior of Whales, Boulder: Westview Press, 1983.
[8] Quotations from and discussion about David Dunn are from an interview by this author on May 16, 2024 via Zoom. Research about Dunn’s publications and recordings, and an earlier discussion, informed the interview.
[9] Dario Martinelli, how musical is a whale?: Towards a Theory of Zoomusicology. Helsinki: International Semiotics Institute, 2002, p. 26.
[10] Regina Barber, Lauren Sommer, Rachel Carlson and Rebecca Ramirez, “Sperm whale families talk a lot. Researchers are trying to decode what they’re saying.” May 20, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1198910024/ai-sperm-whales-communication-language]
[11] Georgiana Heniage, “Can AI translate what whales are saying to each other?” The Times of London, Sept. 21, 2023.
[12] K. Payne, Tyack and R. Payne, 1983. This reference documents whale song lengths.
[13] Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. D.C.: Island Press, 1996, 20, pp. 153-155.
