A 'crackling, haunting voice from the deep': The moment the world realised whales sing
Ocean AllianceIn 1970, the release of the best-selling nature album of all time introduced the world to whale song and transformed how we view whales forever.
It was 1952 and the height of the Cold War. US sonar engineer Frank Watlington was stationed off the coast of Bermuda, listening in the depths for Soviet submarines and seismic activity.
Watlington was using an early kind of hydrophone: long cables with a microphone at the end that he would sink into the ocean. It's not known what military operations he may have detected, but he did begin to pick up something else.
The mournful, disconcerting sounds would go on sometimes for hours. Watlington was fascinated. He couldn't be sure, but he began to think they were being made by humpback whales.
It turned out he was right. Watlington and others' incredible early recordings of humpback communication would go on to transform our view of whales forever. When these were featured on the iconic 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale, they introduced the otherworldly sounds of whale song to a world that previously barely knew it existed.
Whale song exploded into popular culture, becoming the soundtrack to the emerging Save the Whales movement that would eventually turn around the declining fortunes of humpbacks. (Scroll down to listen to a clip from the album).
A discovery of song
Watlington began sharing his recordings with locals and researchers, and in 1967 he met acoustic biologists Katy and Roger Payne, who had travelled to Bermuda. He played them the recordings in the engine room of his research vessel – a wooden ex-minesweeper from World War Two – while the generator roared in the background.
"What I heard under impossibly awful conditions of listening was the most extraordinary, amazing acoustic performance I'd ever heard from any animal, and have ever heard from any animal since," Roger, who died in 2023, told the BBC's The Documentary podcast in 2020.
The couple were amazed by the beautiful, incredibly variable sounds. "They were, as we learned later, the sounds of just one animal," Katy told NPR in 2015. "Just one animal."
Watlington lent them a recording, which Katy, Roger and their collaborators (conservationist Scott McVay, mathematician Hella McVay and researcher Eleanora D'Arms) began working to decipher.
The oldest whale recording
There are scattered historic accounts from sailors and whalers describing humpback whale song, but most had faded into obscurity by the early 20th Century.
In 2026, an even older 1949 recording of humpback whales was discovered. The scientists who recorded it near Bermuda didn't know what it was at the time, though, and simply labelled it "fish noises".
They realised that the sounds were being repeated in long, predictable patterns. "You couldn't listen to it 100 times as I have done without realising that slowly," Roger told the BBC in 2020. "When an animal makes a sound which is rhythmic and repeats itself, it is defined as being singing." Sometimes the songs would go on for up to half an hour, only to be repeated again and again.
People generally knew at the time that whales produced sounds, says Nan Hauser, a whale researcher and director of the Center for Cetacean Research and Conservation in the Cook Islands. But realising this was song was "an enormous conceptual leap… from an animal making noises to an animal producing an extraordinarily elaborate, organised acoustic display".
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Roger, an environmentalist dedicated to saving what he would refer to as the "wild world", quickly realised he had more in his hands than a scientific discovery.
He began playing the tracks to anyone who would listen: at anti-whaling protests, at conferences, at dinner parties. "He was like a little kid with a new toy that everybody had to listen to," says Iain Kerr, chief executive of Ocean Alliance, a US-based non-profit that Roger Payne went on to found. "And really what a catalyst it was… to suddenly go, 'Oh my god, these are sort of singer-poets, composers'."
Song is quite an unusual behaviour in the natural world, and its new association with whales resonated with people, says Andy Rogan, a marine mammal biologist and science and conservation director at Ocean Alliance. Apart from humans, it was really just birds that were thought to sing, he says.
"On one level it's not necessarily that different from another animal behaviour… [But] what's the purpose of going for half an hour? For an animal that takes up a lot of mental capacity."
In 1970, Roger, Katy and Watlington released Songs of the Humpback Whale, an album containing five recordings of humpback whales, chosen specifically for their beauty and power to move humans.
The album was a resounding success, rapidly bringing the haunting sounds of humpbacks to millions of people. It sold more than 125,000 copies – making it the biggest selling nature album in history – and an extract was sent to all 10.5 million National Geographic subscribers, the largest single pressing in recording history. "No one had really heard anything like this before," says Kerr.
Ocean AllianceRoger used the album to drum up support for whale protection, sending out copies to everyone from the Beatles to Bob Dylan. Singers Judy Collins and Kate Bush featured whale song in their albums. Extracts were used in a 1986 film Star Trek film, in a time travel plot about rescuing humpback whales from extinction. In 1977, an excerpt was even launched into space, on the Voyager 1 Golden Record phonograph.
A changed perception
Exposure to the sounds of large whales before 1970 was rare, says Max Bridge, an environmental historian at Harvard University in the US who wrote a recent paper on the history of humpback whale song. "In popular movies and cartoons in the 1960s, fictional large whales are usually either silent or make beastly growling, grunting sounds."
The album's release formed part of a wider shift in the public's perception of whales at the time, says Rogan. Whales were previously often seen as something to fear, as in stories like Moby Dick, or as a commodity, he says. "Whales are [now] part of that upper echelon of charismatic wildlife that we all grow up with… I don't think that was the case before these songs came out."
Hunted for centuries for everything from oil used for lighting and soap to the ambergris used in perfumes, by the early 1970s, several whale species were on the brink of extinction. This included humpbacks: less than 5% of their pre-whaling numbers remained.
Why do whales sing?
Even today, it's not known exactly why humpback whales sing.
Since it's mainly males that sing, it's often thought to be related to mating, such as attracting females or warding off competing males. But it could be far more complicated.
Some scientists suggest it could be a form of long-range communication and echolocation, with animals changing the pitch to help create maps of their underwater worlds. "A singer may be advertising something about himself," says Hauser. "There may be social functions that we haven't recognised yet."
Together with mid-1970s images of whales being harpooned taken by a newly-formed Greenpeace, Songs of the Humpback Whales helped to galvanised a fledgling anti-whaling movement. "[It] allowed ordinary people to hear whales in their own homes," says Hauser. "You didn't need to be a scientist to be moved by it."
Amidst rising pressure, in 1972, the US Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and in 1982 a legally binding global moratorium on commercial whaling was passed, followed by a full ban in 1985-86.
Populations of some whales began to increase, and humpbacks in particular have since seen a remarkable recovery. In some places, they are now even being seen in super-groups of hundreds at a time.
That '70s sound
The discovery of whale song formed part of a wider revolution in environmentalism and understanding of animal intelligence occurring at the time.
Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962, examining the environmental impact of synthetic pesticides. The first Earth Day in 1970 mobilised some 20 million people, while scientists like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey were busy transforming our understanding of other intelligent primates.
Whale song started being seen as a symbol of a broader ecological crises, even as "mournful pleas on the part of the natural world", says Bridge. By the late 1970s, though, US popular culture became more cynical towards symbols of earnest environmentalism like whales or their song, they add, then in the 1980s it was adopted as a key sound of New Age music. Even today it is still largely viewed as a kind of relaxant for the stresses of white-collar life, adds Bridge.
Ocean AllianceAt the same time, whale song discovery helped kickstart modern whale biology in the previously poorly studied animals, says Rogan.
Katy discovered that all males in one area will sing roughly the same song – and that this song evolves over time. We now know these songs can also spread from population to population across enormous distances, sometimes rapidly replacing a previous local favourite. "We're watching culture move through an ocean," says Hauser.
And while humpbacks have the most complex known song among whales (it even shows some hallmarks of human language), the sounds of other whales have also astonished researchers. Sperm whales, for example, which converse in Morse code-like sequences of clicks known as codas, are now known to have regional dialects, while males also make separate slower, deeper and enormously loud clicks. And the immense calls of the blue whale, too low for the human ear to pick up, can travel up to 1,000 miles (1,600km).
Some researchers are even trying to converse with whales and decipher what they are saying. In later life, Roger became involved in this effort.
There are now thousands of recordings of whale sounds and other nature sounds pleasing to the human ear. Still, Kerr argues, none quite have the "harmony or the sort of enchanting nature" of those '70s tracks. "There's a wonderful sort of aesthetic to it, this sort of crackling, haunting voice from the deep."
Perhaps the period just happened to feature especially beautiful humpback whale song, says Alyssa Wile, who is in charge of digitising and archiving Ocean Alliance's vast collection archive of marine mammal sounds from the 1950s to 1990s, including many recorded by Katy and Roger.
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Wile still remembers listening to Songs of the Humpback Whale for the first time as a child. "It's extraordinary, and every time I listen to it, I do get the chills."
Today, whales compete within a very different soundscape of anthropogenic noise, making protecting older recordings incredibly important, she says. "These recordings preserve a particular moment in space and time as well as particular individuals," she says. "We can track those changes over time, how whales are communicating differently, how the soundscape itself is different."
Whales still face many threats, from ship strikes and entanglement in nets to ongoing whaling in some countries to noise pollution and warming seas. Today, one in four whale species is threatened with extinction, up from one in seven in 1991.
Still, Songs of the Humpback Whale "was unquestionably one of the great catalysts" towards protecting whales, says Hauser. "Most people would never see a living humpback whale, but suddenly they could put a record on and hear one," she says. "Suddenly the conversation wasn't simply, 'How many whales remain?'. It became 'What kind of beings are we killing?'"
* Jocelyn Timperley is a senior journalist for the BBC's science features team.
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