The strange tale of the first whale sounds album
If you are the type of person who cannot go to bed without the sounds of the ocean lulling you to sleep, chances are, you are unaware of how those sounds came to be. The story begins on a beach just outside of Boston.
Dr Roger Payne was an American biologist and environmentalist whose focus was on bioacoustics. He had already established a background in bat and owl echolocation, but his draw towards whales happened by chance. One day in the late 1960s, Payne heard on the radio that a dead whale had washed up on Revere Beach, north of downtown Boston, Massachusetts and near Tufts University, where he had been working.
He decided to see the whale for himself and found that the porpoise had already been cruelly tampered with. Souvenir hunters had hacked off the flukes (the broad, flattened lobes) of the whale’s tail, someone carved their initials into its side, and a cigar butt was found in its blowhole. Payne later said: “I removed the cigar and stood there for a long time with feelings I cannot describe. Everybody has some such experience that affects him for life, probably several. That night was mine.”
As he continued his studies, the remnants of what Payne came across on Revere Beach remained in his mind. In 1966, he came across the whale recordings of Frank Waltington, a Navy engineer who, eight years earlier, was manning a top-secret hydrophone station off the coast of Bermuda, listening for Russian submarines. Instead, he became haunted by underwater moaning and wailing sounds, and thankfully, he thought to capture them. Payne requested copies of the recordings and, while studying them, came to realise that the songs were repetitive. The shortest being about six minutes long, and the longest being over 30, each song could repeat for up to 24 hours. Graphing each song, Payne discovered that they displayed a definite structure.
Continuing his research alongside his then-wife, Katharine Payne, the pair discovered that all male whales in a respective ocean sing the same song. Further, these songs evolve subtly each year, never reverting to their previous renditions. Katharine Payne found that the longer whale songs had structures comparable to rhyming, with key structures repeating at intervals. This poses the possibility that the whales use mnemonic devices (or memory tricks) to help them remember more complex songs.
The Paynes’ findings led to the production of Songs of the Humpback Whale, a studio album released in August 1970. The collection sold over 100,000 copies, becoming the bestselling environmental album in history. The first to publicly demonstrate these sea creatures’ elaborate vocalisations, it demystified the whale to the public. Proceeds from sales of the album also benefited the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Whale Fund, of which Payne was Scientific Director. Their efforts sought to conserve whales through research and public education, and such efforts were matched with fervent activism from the community. The album helped spawn the worldwide ‘Save The Whales’ movement, started by those who seek to end whaling locally and globally to conserve marine life.
Excerpts from Songs of the Humpback Whale went on to be featured in film scores, sampled in 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and used to create the sound effects for the terrorising monster Biollante in 1989’s Godzilla vs Biollante. The whales also continued to make their mark on popular music. Judy Collins sings along to the whale songs on ‘Farewell to Tarwathie,’ from her album Whales & Nightingales. ‘Moving’, the opening track to Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside, begins with a whale song. While not directly sampled from Payne’s album, French metal band Gojira crafted their own sounds to fit their environmentally-conscious concept album, From Mars To Sirius. Their song ‘Flying Whales’ is a death roar, as vocalist Joe Duplantier sings of the beauty of ocean life, inspired by the complexity of the ocean-based mammals’ brains.
It is maddening to think that, had Dr Payne not visited Revere Beach that day and been struck by the goddamn cruelty inflicted on the beached whale, we may not know or fully understand the intelligence of the sea mammal. Further, Songs of the Humpback Whale helped popularise a genre rooted in environmental and social activism, innovating a new form of protest music.
