{"id":16720,"date":"2016-01-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live-hakamagwp.pantheonsite.io\/news\/caamano-sound-whale-music"},"modified":"2019-08-15T10:20:25","modified_gmt":"2019-08-15T17:20:25","slug":"caamano-sound-whale-music","status":"publish","type":"custom_quick","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/article-short\/caamano-sound-whale-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Caama\u00f1o: The Sound of (Whale) Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

The steady hiss from the speakers is broken by a long, clear call. Hermann Meuter spins his chair around to a tall bank of acoustic equipment, slips on a pair of headphones, and taps a button to start recording. Janie Wray turns from her computer to look toward the source of the sound\u2014not up at the speakers mounted on the wall but out the window to the white-capped sea.<\/p>\n

The first notes have the mellow resonance of a saxophone in a rainy alleyway: a smooth slide up an octave, and then a descending minor arpeggio laid over the echo. The same call again, this time with an extra riff on the descent. A second voice adds a deep grumbling that sets the floor of the lab vibrating. For the next 45 minutes, the two whales sing together.<\/p>\n\n

Humpback whales singing. Recorded by Cetacea Lab in Caama\u00f1o Sound off the coast of British Columbia. Audio courtesy of Cetacea Lab<\/span><\/p>\n

Humpback whale songs are among the most complex, and least understood, acoustic displays in the animal kingdom. All cetaceans are vocal to some degree, and humpbacks have a wide range of feeding and social calls. The seasonal singing of male humpbacks, however, is of an entirely different order: complex, highly structured, and precisely repeated arrangements of calls, from deep grumbles to fluting trills.<\/p>\n

Since the 1950s, when an American navy engineer using underwater microphones to listen for submarines made the first serendipitous recording of humpback songs, the calls\u00a0have captured the attention of scientists and the imagination of listeners. The 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale<\/em> broke sales records, helped galvanize a worldwide movement to end the commercial whale hunt, and launched a then 10-year-old Wray into a lifetime of whale research. \u201cI played that over and over again,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was my first experience of being emotionally moved by a sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exactly how and why the whales sing is still a mystery. So is the means by which the song is composed and shared across whale populations such that in any given breeding season, whales as far apart as Mexico, Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines are singing essentially the same song\u2014and each year it is a different song.<\/p>\n

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Researchers Janie Wray and Hermann Meuter are devoted listeners to the whales that visit Caama\u00f1o Sound. A network of hydrophones continuously transmits signals to the lab. Photo courtesy of Cetacea Lab<\/p><\/div>\n

In their feeding grounds in Alaska and British Columbia, male humpbacks begin singing in the fall, a few weeks before they begin their southward migration to breed. The whales around Caama\u00f1o Sound, on British Columbia\u2019s remote north coast, have a rare, and devoted, terrestrial audience. Wray and her research partner Meuter\u2014who traces his own fascination with whales back to his attempt at age five to grasp the idea of sharing the planet with creatures so large\u2014arrived in this area in 2000. Together with the Gitga\u2019at First Nation, Wray and Meuter cofounded Cetacea Lab, a whale research station perched on the rugged shore of Gil Island in the heart of the Great Bear coast. They have had their ears to the sea ever since.<\/p>\n

Cetacea Lab gets its power from a nearby creek, its groceries by ferry from Prince Rupert, and its seasonal research interns from around the world. Its nearest neighbor is the Gitga\u2019at community of Hartley Bay, an hour away by boat; Vancouver is over 600 kilometers to the south. For the past 15 years, Wray and Meuter have constituted the entire resident human population of Gil Island.<\/p>\n

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Illustration by Mark Garrison<\/p><\/div>\n

Through methodical surveys at sea and from the compact plywood-and-driftwood observation lab that serves as their center of operations, the two study the feeding and social behavior of this region\u2019s resurging population of humpback whales. They also keep at least one ear turned day and night to the underwater soundscape. A network of hydrophones transmits signals to the lab, to a sound system in the house tucked farther back in the forest, and to portable speakers strung like lanterns in the trees\u2014creating unlikely duets as the haunting calls of whales mix with the chatter of ravens along the forest trails. \u201cWe are listening in the kitchen, in the bedrooms. Everywhere except the toilet,\u201d says Meuter. \u201cAnd that\u2019s coming,\u201d laughs Wray.<\/p>\n

The whales begin to arrive in the early spring, skinny from their months of fasting through the breeding season and their long migration. \u201cJune and July, we\u2019re listening to feeding calls from sunrise to sunset,\u201d says Wray. Through the summer, the feeding frenzy relaxes and the lab notebooks show scribbled attempts to capture the nuances of social calls. Gruuup? Bloop. Grumbly rawkkk.<\/em> In October, the jotted lists of dates and recording times gain new embellishments: stars, exclamation marks, and occasionally a cluster of hearts. Song practice! Beautiful \u2026 Singing\u2014amazing echoes!!! Into full song. Clear, resonant. Wow!!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pretty amazing to listen to,\u201d Wray says. \u201cOne whale will start up, maybe with just a simple up and down: \u2018dii doo, dii doo\u2019; then \u2018dii doo-DIP, dii-doo DIP, dii doo-DIP diidoo.\u2019 He\u2019s just playing around, changing one bit or another. Then another whale will pipe in. That whale will maybe just add a \u2018woop,\u2019 but the timing will be like \u2018diiwoop<\/em>DIPdiidoo.\u2019\u201d She waves her arms to the beat. \u201cTwo or three whales will do this together. Like musicians jamming, it\u2019s all kind of random and then suddenly it\u2019s a song.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Humpback whales breaching is a common sight in Caama\u00f1o Sound, off the British Columbia coast. Photo courtesy of Cetacea Lab<\/p><\/div>\n

In many parts of the world, whale songs compete with the ruckus of human industry. But this stretch of wild coast includes some of the quietest waters in the northeast Pacific Ocean, and many of Cetacea Lab\u2019s recordings capture no boat noise at all. The narrow channels are also lined with steep rock faces that generate clear, strong echoes. \u201cIt would be like singing in the bathtub,\u201d says Meuter.<\/p>\n

Wray and Meuter believe that all of these features are important to the whales and hope that their research will help make the case to establish protected areas and acoustic refuges around Caama\u00f1o Sound. As humpbacks concentrate here in the fall, they mix, mingle, and sing in shifting combinations\u2014like musicians dropping into one another\u2019s studios. Then they split up, taking their songs on the road to different breeding grounds around the North Pacific. \u201cIt\u2019s not one whale teaching another,\u201d notes Wray. \u201cIt\u2019s co-creation. Maybe they all have the same song because they have worked on it together already.\u201d<\/p>\n

Long after the whale song ends, Wray is still looking out to sea. \u201cThere is so much we don\u2019t know. And that\u2019s what makes it so exciting.\u201d Then she smiles conspiratorially. \u201cBut really, I just still love listening to whales.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is this where North Pacific humpback whales practice their songs?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12885,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"acf":{"hero_video_url":null,"hero_video_caption":"","deck":"Is this where North Pacific humpback whales practice their songs?","authors_group":[{"by_group":"by","contributors_group":[15499]}],"word_count_override":"","podbean1":"unb85u\/Caaman_o_The_Sound_of_Whale_Music.mp3","podbean2":"auixm-ab402d","redirect":"","geolocation":{"address":"53.093268, -129.2573","lat":53.093268,"lng":-129.2573},"related":[16203,28437],"twitterimage":19599,"facebookimage":19190,"twitterdescription":"","edited":"","factchecked":"","code":"","no_old_story_flag":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-short\/16720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-short"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/custom_quick"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-short\/16720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28566,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-short\/16720\/revisions\/28566"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/28437"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}