Discovering the sonic diversity of whale songs

For more than thirteen years, David Rothenberg has been traveling the world listening underwater to find new kinds of whale sounds and collaborating with scientists to share their best recordings. He was inspired to explore whale sounds after releasing the book, Why Birds Sing in 2005 about making music live with birds.

In the course of writing his second book, Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound in 2008, he traveled to Arctic Russia to record beluga whales, Vancouver Island to record killer whales, and Hawaii to record humpback whales. The sounds of humpback whales inspired the whole project with their long, complex songs. No human had heard them before the 1950s when the U.S. Navy discovered their sounds by accident while listening for enemy Soviet submarines.

When Umru was eleven, his father took him out to record whale sounds for the first time off the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway. Rothenberg credits this experience as being one of the things that piqued his interest in becoming an electronic music producer.

Rothenberg said, “whale sounds contain everything you need to produce electronic music. No other sound sources are necessary. Why use anything else? Like John Lilly said in the sixties, ‘the aliens are here among us, down under the sea’.”

These sounds may inspire you to create music unique to anything else. He added “I hope producers create music I can’t even imagine, knowing that their sound sources come from all over the world, deep in the sea, a world of mystery that humans still can’t really understand. Slow them down, speed them up, transform them in extreme ways to truly reveal the possibilities they contain within. And once you’re ready, take a trip out into the ocean and play live with the animals who’ve been generous with their most mysterious and beautiful sounds.”

Portions of the proceeds of this pack will be donated to Whale Trust (whaletrust.org), an organization on a mission to promote, support, and conduct scientific research on whales and the marine environment.