Humpback Whale Songs

“Music is the universal language,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow claimed. Unfortunately, we cannot translate the music whales are composing. Pause for a moment and think about how unique it is for any animal to compose music! Many birds have musical calls, but their songs remain the same for a lifetime. They are singing, but they are not composing.* On the other hand, the male humpback whales have been described as "inveterate composers of songs that are strikingly similar to human musical traditions."[1] Each year, all the males in a population sing the same song, but the songs change from year to year. The changes are not minor; they are whole new repertoires. “For decades, researchers have studied the elegant, ululating songs of male humpbacks,"[2] In all this time, the same combination of sounds has never reoccurred! The song-composing ability of humpback (and other) whales is direct evidence for a Composer a.k.a. Creator since fine arts or music are not the results of random mishaps.

How and why would a symphony magically appear? Charles Darwin recognized an analogous problem of trying to fit beauty into an evolutionary model. Evolution (by definition) is unplanned, unsupervised, unintelligent, and more to the point in this case, unartistic. Darwin wrote, “The sight of a feather in a peacock tail makes me sick.”[3] Darwin was referring to how the peacock’s inexplicable beauty conflicted with his theory. Similarly, music does not “fit” the evolutionary model. There is no naturalistic explanation for beauty or symphonies in animals. Following the scientific method requires the naturalistic theory to be abandoned, not the evidence to be ignored.

Humpback whales’ songs can travel over a 1000 miles through the ocean. The sequences of “are quite complex and often continue for hours on end.”[4] Humpback whales change their song as a group and each ocean’s population sings a consistent song. Most of these songs last just under a half-hour and then repeat. This repetition is so precise that their performance is referred to as “singing” and each repeated series of sounds is termed a “song.” One song cycle can last up to 24 hours. Like human language, whale music constitutes sonic communication that exhibits remarkable structural complexity.

Yearly, a new song moves group by group travelling thousands of miles across an ocean. These songs are either carried by males who move between populations or shared when humpbacks mingle on migrations. For about half a century, scientists have tried tackling the question of why whales are singing. It was first proposed that singing attracted a mate, but not one shred of evidence has been found to support this theory. Many other questions remain unanswered: Why do whales have completely new themes year to year and alter their songs month to month or sometimes even week to week? Why do only the males sing? In a given group, why do all the whales tend to sing the identical tune? Even current research has failed to shed light on these questions.

Some researchers are so impressed with the humpback whales they “align them on the spectrum of personhood!”[5] The reason for this respect is humpback whales are very social creatures with highly developed brains and complex behaviors. According to scientists, whales actually possess a culture. The humpback whales learn various songs “through their social living, singing, and listening, and thus can be said to possess a form of culture.”[6] In addition, the whale’s brain has the same type of spindle neuron cells that direct feelings of fear and pleasure in humans. The frontoinsular cortex in people is active when we empathize with others. Spindle neurons help us remember emotions and “enable us to care for others beyond our immediate needs.” In whales these spindle cells are “found in the frontopolar cortex, but no one knows what they are doing there.” [7]

In his book, Thousand Mile Song, naturalist David Rothenberg alludes to an idea suggesting whales are communicating emotion rather than information with their songs. If this radical idea is true, then whales are composing and singing music for the same reasons that humans enjoy music! That theory would explain a great deal. First, it explains why there are stanzas and rhymes in the songs (first identified by scientists in 1971) and why the songs are a true composition with elements of rhythm and patterns. If whales are making music as art, it would explain why the sounds are recognized as mystical and beautiful. If whales compose and sing for enjoyment, then it makes sense the songs change frequently—because whales would tire of last year’s tunes. It may sound far-fetched to compare whales’ appreciation of music to our own, but scientists have been unable to formulate any other idea which fits the whale’s observed behavior so well. If people play around with “sounds for their own emotional and beautiful qualities, why not accept that other creatures could dwell in music the same way?”[8]

Of course, then the question remains, what type of song does the humpback whale sing? In the Bible the imperative is given in Isaiah 42:10: “Sing to the Lord a new song, and His praise from the ends of the earth, You who go down to the sea, and all that is in it…Sing to the Lord, all the earth.” Perhaps the mighty humpback whale is simply doing as it is told.


*Exceptions are the Nightingale and two African songbirds which do change their songs over a season.



[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_vocalization

[2] Keim, Brandon. “Listen: Humpback Whale Songs That Swept the Pacific.”

[3] Charles Darwin’s letter to Asa Gray. April 3, 1860. Darwin Correspondence Project, no. 2743.

[4] National Geographic. http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/humpback-whale/

[5] Keim

[6] Revkin, Andrew C. Humpback Whales Yield Some Secrets to Science. 20 March 2012.

[7] Rothenberg, David. Thousand Mile Song. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

[8] Rothenberg.