Saturday, March 13, 2010
Thousand Mile Song Whale Music in a Sea of Sound. By David Rothenburg, Basic Books; £10.99
WHY do whales sing? There are many theories but nobody knows, which is a pity, because it’s an important question. It’s not important to whales; they know why they sing. But it could teach us why we like music.
Thousand Mile Song tackles this question, and it’s an unusual book by an unusual man. David Rothenberg is not a biologist. He is the professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an accomplished jazz musician and clarinetist. Although he’s not a biologist, he approaches whale ‘song’ with academic rigour.
Rothenberg’s interviewees range from composers of classical music to marine biologists, from IT experts to people who teach dolphins to perform tricks in amusement parks. The result is a book that is often fascinating, but sometimes heavy going. There are pages analysing sonograms of whale song — print-outs from computers recording the songs in a digitised visual format. These are not light reading. Some of the musicological detail is also difficult.
Some of Rothenberg’s ideas are fascinating. The philosopher in him is trying to find out whether whale music is ‘cultural’; whether it has aesthetic value for the whales; or whether it’s ‘behavioural’ and is just used for functional purposes, such as navigating, communicating or attracting a mate.
The musician in him wants to get into a jamming session with the whales. This is technically simple: you hang an underwater speaker off the side of the boat and play your clarinet into a microphone on board; you suspend a hydrophone, or underwater microphone, so you can hear if the whales join in. In most of the world’s oceans, this is illegal. Conservationists regard playing a clarinet to a whale as harassment. So Rothenberg has to resort to subterfuges, some legal and some not, to jam with his whales.
He also has to travel the world and has encounters with orcas, or killer whales, off western Canada, white beluga whales in the White Sea, in western Siberia, and the musical humpbacks off the Hawaiian Islands.
The great baleen whales, such as blue whales and fin whales, are more elusive, but they are the species that give the book its title. Swimming at a depth where the temperature and salinity of the ocean allow sound to carry immense distances, they emit massive roars — the loudest sounds made by any living creature. These sounds can be heard by other whales 1,000 miles away, the ‘thousand mile song’.
One US Navy listening station, monitoring submarine traffic in the Atlantic, has recorded a blue whale on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland having a ‘conversation’ with a whale off the Spanish coast.
Definitive answers are rare in biology and this book doesn’t provide one to the question of why whales ‘sing’. But it does provide some fascinating insights into whales and comes with a 12-track CD of ‘inter-species music’.
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