Resumen de To Wail With a Whale: anatomy of an Interspecies Duet
A clarinet was played along live with a singing male humpback whale off a boat off the coast of Maui. A four and a half minute passage of the duet is visually analyzed using a sound spectrogram to suggest that the whale may alter his song in response to what the clarinet played. This observation is consistent with the fact that humpback whales rapidly change their song during breeding season from week to week, with all the male whales singing the same new song, even as it steadily evolves in a very short period of time. Interspecies music thus demonstrates that a male humpback whale is able to quickly match new pitched, musical sounds it has never heard before, a result different from most humpback whale playback experiments, where the whales have shown little interest in the sounds we play back to them, aside from summer feeding sounds played off-season in the winter. This result helps to confirm the reigning theory that humpback whales have a culture of song that changes steadily over the course of a single season.
