A series of these songs can be repeated extensively, up to twenty-three hours in a single session. Some of the phrases end with the same contrasting sound, so they can be said to rhyme, in a way analogous to human poems. Each complete song consists of five to seven themes. They consist of repeating patterns, hierarchically organized at the level of unit (or motif), phrase, theme, and song. Humpback songs are far more musical in structure than the sound of any other dolphin or whale. ![]() With more than ten million copies printed at once in many languages, this remains the largest single pressing of any audio recording in history. The original recording assembled by Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale became a platinum record, selling more than a million copies, and in 1979 an excerpt from it was included as a ‘sound page,’ in National Geographic. In the pop world the humpback whale song and the plight of the whale found its way into works by Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Captain Beefheart, Crosby Stills and Nash, Jethro Tull, Yes, Paul Winter, Charlie Haden, the Partridge Family, Country Joe and the Fish, Laurie Anderson, Alice in Chains, Tom Waits, and Lou Reed, to name but a few. (Payne and McVay, 1971) During the following decades the astonishing moans of this whale made its way into human culture, becoming the inspiration for famous classical compositions by Alan Hovhaness, George Crumb, and later John Cage and Toru Takemitsu. These songs were first described in the literature by Roger Payne and Scott McVay, who took a bold step for scientific rhetoric when they praised the surprising beauty of these sounds in the prestigious journal Science in 1971. The song of the humpback whale is the most extended patterned vocalization produced by any animal. PLAYING ALONG WITH A WHALE (link to MP3 in )Ī clarinet/humpback duet as featured in the final chapter of Thousand Mile Song Key words: interspecies music, humpback whale, evolution of musical styles This result helps to confirm the reigning theory that humpback whales have a culture of song that changes steadily over the course of a single season. Interspecies music thus demonstrates that a male humpback whale is able to quickly match new pitched, musical sounds it has never heard before, a result different from most humpback whale playback experiments, where the whales have shown little interest in the sounds we play back to them, aside from summer feeding sounds played off-season in the winter. This observation is consistent with the fact that humpback whales rapidly change their song during breeding season from week to week, with all the male whales singing the same new song, even as it steadily evolves in a very short period of time. A four and a half minute passage of the duet is visually analyzed using a sound spectrogram to suggest that the whale may alter his song in response to what the clarinet played. ![]() To Wail With a Whale Anatomy of an Interspecies Duet David RothenbergĪ clarinet was played along live with a singing male humpback whale off a boat off the coast of Maui.
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