If you hear whale songs today, you might be getting a massage or a
facial. Some recordings of humpback whales feature slow melodies
soothing enough for spa soundtracks. But in the 1970s, whale songs
ignited the passions of music listeners and animal activists.
Biologist Roger Payne still thinks whale songs are the most evocative
sound made by any animal. Though he’s not unbiased — he discovered
them. When Payne started studying a mysterious recording in 1966,
there was very little known about the sounds whales made, or why they
made them. The recording came from a sound designer doing military
research, Frank Watlington, who was trying to record undersea dynamite
explosions.
Payne became obsessed with the recording, and made a startling
discovery: the sounds were repeating. That means that they were
scientifically classified as songs, arguably the most complex songs of
any animal. Unlike birds or crickets, the whales’ songs were ten or
more minutes long and repeated without a break.
At the time, whales were being hunted to near-extinction, and Payne
saw the discovery of whale songs as a call-to-arms. “Do you make cat
food out of composer-poets? I think that’s a crime.” Over the
following years, Payne pressed the recordings on musicians, composers,
and singers, including Judy Collins
[http://www.judycollins.com/index1.php]. “This tall man walked
backstage,” Collins recalls. “And he handed me this little
package” with a tape of the humpback whales. “It was very
emotional. They’re so smart and have been here so long, and might
have some insights about how we might live a better way.”
In 1970, Collins used the recordings on her album Whales and
Nightingales
[http://www.amazon.com/Whales-Nightingales-Judy-Collins/dp/B001OB5ZN6/wnyc-s360-20],
which went gold and introduced millions to whale song. She sings with
the recordings “like a call and response, because I’m responding
to them, and vice versa — they are answering me as well.” Collins
devoted the royalties of those songs to Payne’s conservation work.
Other whale song records appeared, and were found on every
counterculture-leaning radio station and LP collection. Just as Payne
hoped, these strange, evocative sounds inspired the growing Save the
Whales [http://www.savethewhales.org/] movement, and by 1972 the US
had banned whaling and whale products.
George Lipsitz
[http://www.blackstudies.ucsb.edu/people/george-lipsitz], an American
studies professor at the University of California, says the Save the
Whale campaign was motivated by more than animal rights. At that time
— in the wake of the Kent State shootings, the assassination of
King, and the escalating Vietnam War — people were questioning the
very notion of progress and civilization. “It’s almost like we
were all looking for a kind of magic, an alchemy, to conjure a new
world into being,” Lipsitz remembers. “Music, and the thinking
around it, had become so conventional. When you disrupt that,”
people thought at the time, “all things become possible.”
