The Songs of Cetaceans

What the complexity and evolution of whale communication can teach us with Sara Niksic

We all have an idea in our heads about what whales sound like thanks to that one scene from Finding Nemo. But have you ever wondered about what they are communicating, why they do it through song, and what we could learn from it? Sara Niksic, Croatian marine biologist, bioacoustician, and educator, has devoted over a decade of her life to studying the communicative culture of humpback whales. To help bridge the gap between scientists and the masses, Sara decided to use the music of whales to create music for humans. With two albums under her belt, she is currently working on the third and final album in her Canticum Megapterae trilogy. Combining art and science to showcase the complexity and evolution in whale songs by remixing their songs, Sara’s ultimate goal is to educate the world on just how intelligent and advanced these gentle giants truly are. And why they are worth protecting. 

Flow Trip: Where did you get the idea to combine the art of music with the science of whale songs? What do you want listeners to take away from hearing your music?

Sara Niksic: The idea came to me 10 years ago when I was in New Zealand. Back then I was doing some bioacoustics research on whale sounds while also working at music festivals. Because both of these things dealt with sound, and I was fully immersed in both worlds, that’s when it came to me to try to combine these two worlds I was living in. That is when I started thinking, through music, I can bring these whale sounds and stories I've collected through my research to people who haven’t had the chance to meet whales. 

When I work as a marine biologist, I am studying the sounds underwater — sound travels some four-and-a-half times faster underwater than through air, so the ocean is actually a world of sound. When you go diving, you literally hear sound coming from all directions. It propagates much further, and it feels like a parallel to a dance floor — when there is a good sound system, you really feel fully immersed in the music. And that’s what I want people to experience by bringing the sounds from the ocean to the dance floor: for them to imagine how it would feel to be in the ocean surrounded by singing whales. My aim was and still is to make people more aware of these sentient beings that have rich and diverse social and cultural lives, much like humans. 

By educating people about this, I'm hoping that it will inspire them to take better care of nature. 

There are so many incredible discoveries out there, but they tend to stay in the science world.  This is one of the reasons why I thought the world needed to hear the whale songs. While the research itself is important, education seems even more important these days. And because I’m taking this interdisciplinary approach with my music between art and science, I think I can have a much greater impact on the world and the fate of whales and other creatures with this kind of project. That's what I’m hoping to do more of in the future. 

FT: Explain the communicative culture of humpback whales in terms a third-grader would understand. 

SN: As I mentioned, sound travels faster in water than air. But this also depends on the frequency of the sound — lower frequencies travel much further than higher frequencies — and different species of whales produce sounds in different frequency ranges. Humpbacks produce a broad range of frequencies, and the sounds on the lower end of that range can travel tens of miles, potentially even more.

Both males and females produce a variety of sounds that they use for communication, but only males arrange them into songs. These songs are some of the most complex vocal displays in the entire animal kingdom, both in terms of hierarchical structure and length, and can be up to 30 minutes in duration.

The Structure of Whale Songs

The smallest element of a song is a unit
Units are organized in a specific sequence to make a phrase
Phrases are repeated to make a theme
Several different themes make up a song 

You can imagine how complex this gets if it goes on for 20 minutes. It has this perfect structure, and each whale living in the same population knows this song. It’s amazing how they learn and memorize these. 

FT: What are the parallels between whale and human culture? How can humans apply this information to themselves?

SN: Studying whales for all these years, I definitely started seeing some parallels between their culture and our own. This evolution was the specific focus of my second album, Canticum Megapterae II. In this album, I was actually drawing parallels between whale song culture and our own music culture by comparing the evolution of whale songs to the evolution of human music. 

Humpback whale songs change throughout time. Each year, they add certain parts, rearrange patterns, have a new theme, or lose some themes from previous years. These changes are trackable, so you can see how one song changes into a different version of the original. I was working on music with different musicians for one of my albums — each with their own unique style, all working with the same whale recording. In the end, each musician created a different song. So I started thinking, why wouldn’t this be the same for the whales? 

Like us humans, perhaps there are more innovative or creative whales, but these changes could also be a collaboration of all individuals within a population. We still don’t know the answer, but maybe each whale has their own input in this song change. When you look at the evolution of human music, we didn’t always have all these different genres of music. At some point in our own history, certain individuals started a new musical genre, then others followed in their footsteps. So why wouldn’t this also be true for the whales? Maybe there are leaders who drive these song changes, and others are followers who only copy these new song types. 

This comparison of their song culture and our own music culture is something I am really interested in. Recently, some new studies have found similarities between humpback whale songs and human language. The first one examined our language and found that the more common words tend to be shorter, and lengthy sentences usually contain a greater number of shorter words. Both of these trends were also found in sequences within whale songs. 

The second study used insights into how babies learn language and found that whale songs share some statistical structures with human languages. Two different species, and very distant from each other evolutionarily, but both have these rules of communication in common, which have probably evolved to make learning easier. I must also point out that so far, we haven’t found any semantic meaning in whale songs, so they are potentially more reminiscent of human music than human language.

FT: As technology continues to advance, how do you foresee this contributing to the understanding and deciphering of whale songs and communication? 

SN: We can advance our technology and understanding of certain ideas, but I don’t think we will ever be able to imagine what it would be like to be a whale or any other creature. As a matter of fact, we even have difficulties understanding each other, let alone other species. So the whole living world is a mystery, and sure, we can discover some things as we advance as a species, but we will never know all of it. That’s what keeps it interesting, and that’s what makes it exciting to study all of these things.

We tend to put ourselves at the top of the animal kingdom or the world, but there are species way more advanced than us in different areas. Even when you think of whales and the way they communicate, it’s more advanced than our communication in some ways. Humpback whale songs can travel across the oceans, which happens really fast and really far in a geographic range, and we were never able to do this until we were able to invent technology. So it’s actually technology that does this for us, not us by our nature. In this way, you could say whales are more advanced. The same can be true for other species and other kinds of ideas. It is beyond time that we see ourselves as a part of nature, as equals, and not on top of or more advanced than any other species. 

Photo by Gerard Whelan | Pexels

FT: Humpback whale songs are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. How could your research and learnings on such a complex form of communication be used to learn about and/or educate on other species' communication?  

SN: I spent many years studying whale behavior and communication, and the more I learned, the more I discovered just how complex they are and just how little I know — the more you know, the more you know how much you don’t know. 

This is true for whales, but I believe this can also be applied across the animal kingdom. And not only the animal kingdom. When we think of plants and fungi, they have different forms of intelligence that we as humans are not even able to perceive. Even with all of this research, we know very little about other species other than ourselves. Our understanding goes just as far as our human brain allows us. 

Drawing parallels between whale or other animal cultures and our own can inform us about some of our own cultures, like how and why they evolved. Across the animal kingdom, there are examples of culture, and if we approach these from our human understanding, they might not seem so fascinating or important. But if we try to think through the animals’ minds, perhaps we can better understand something that, for us, might not be that exciting, but for them is great and allows them to live their lives in their own way. 

FT: Have you been able to recognize patterns and/or understand what they are trying to communicate? 

SN: I started studying humpback whale songs back in 2013, so it’s been a while. I still cannot tell you what they are trying to communicate. The most accepted hypothesis in the scientific community today is that the function of the songs is for sexual selection. But I believe there could be more to it, and more information coded in it. But we still don't know. 

After spending so much time analyzing different populations’ songs over the years, one can tell where the song originates from. This is not something you would know when you start studying them, but after a while, you start to recognize some patterns. And if you analyze songs from different parts of the world, you can tell if one comes from Australia or America, or anywhere else in the world.

Image by Elianne Dipp | Pexels

FT: How do whale songs travel between different populations, and why do they adopt other populations’ songs? Do we have the science yet to understand why whales pick up and learn new songs?

SN: Each population of humpback whales has their own song. However, populations that are closer together geographically will have some overlapping parts of their songs, so you can tell if they are close by. But populations that live in completely different parts of the world — think of the Northern Hemisphere versus the Southern Hemisphere — will have completely different songs.

In addition to the song evolution I mentioned earlier, another even more amazing phenomenon scientists have discovered is song revolutions. So as opposed to these slow evolutions that happen gradually over the course of years, revolution is, well, revolutionary.

Researchers first discovered this in Australia while recording the songs of humpbacks migrating along the East Coast each year to track their song evolution. But in 1997, they recorded a completely different song — not the evolved version of the previous year's song, but a completely new song. They then compared this to the recordings of a different group of whales in Western Australia from previous years, and the researchers figured out that the two songs were the same. In other words, the East Coast humpbacks ditched their own song and took on the song from the West Coast populations, and we have no idea why. This happened over the course of only one year, which is not a long time at all when thinking of evolution. 

But the journey didn’t stop there. The scientists continued tracking this song revolution across the entire Pacific. The next year, the same song was recorded in New Caledonia, then Tonga, then American Samoa, the Cook Islands, and eventually French Polynesia. Each year, the song moved to the next population, and for some reason, it went eastward. Then, just a few years back, they tracked the phenomenon all the way to Ecuador. So this song revolution started in Australia, traveled all the way across the Pacific Ocean, to South America. Such a cultural transmission across such a vast geographic range — the whole ocean basin — and so fast, is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. 

We still don’t know why this happens, but we are starting to understand the mechanisms of how the different whale populations learn these new songs — a process called horizontal cultural transmission. Vertical cultural transmission would be from parents to offspring, whereas horizontal is from other surrounding whales. In the last few years, there have been some studies looking more into these mechanisms of learning, in addition to the similar rules of communication they share with human language that make learning easier.

Where can we find your music?

Streaming: SoundCloud, YouTube

For purchase: Bandcamp

Sara is currently in Tonga recording whale songs for her third and final Canticum Megapterae album. She managed to get there with the generous help from backers of her crowdfunding campaign titled ‘Whale Song Revolution’. The campaign is still open, and all donations will go towards producing the album and education. If you would like to be part of this truly unique story you can do so here.