A 'crackling, haunting voice from the deep': The moment the world realised whales sing

In 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).

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........

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