The ocean breathes stories. For millennia, humans have stood at its edge, hearing the crash of waves, the cries of gulls, and sometimes, carried on the wind or through the hull of a ship, the haunting, complex songs of whales. These vast, intelligent beings navigate a world primarily of sound, their voices capable of traversing entire ocean basins. We long to understand them, to bridge the immense gap between our terrestrial, visual world and their fluid, acoustic realm. But how do we even begin to listen?
This question resonates profoundly in the work of Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini. Their correspondence, documented in Silent Whale Letters, isn't just about whale song; it's an experiment in attuning to frequencies beyond our immediate grasp, meditating on the "infravoice" – sounds felt rather than heard, energies that ripple through water and time. They consider the ocean itself an archive, one that preserves not by static storage, but through dynamic dispersal. As they write, listening to the vast, often silent presence of a whale becomes a practice not just of detection, but of acknowledging the profound limits of our own perception. I
In an excerpt reflecting on the sheer physicality and the sonic medium, one asks: "Listening to the whale call is one such way to perceive by ear the buoyant body in or through water... we are hearing the relation of vibration and medium... And I am so struck by this ‘opportunity to listen’ to the ocean, to the quiet which, four months later, sadly, does not appear to have lasted so long." This perspective introduces a necessary humility: much of the whale's world remains, perhaps necessarily, outside the audible frequencies and comprehensible frameworks we possess. It challenges us to consider what "silence" truly means in an ocean teeming with life and communication operating on scales—temporal, spatial, and sensory—that dwarf our own.
Yet, driven by scientific curiosity, we persist in trying to find patterns within this immensity. A recent study, "Whale song shows language-like statistical structure" published in Science, takes a fascinatingly different approach. Led by Inbal Arnon, Simon Kirby, and colleagues including Ellen Garland, this study applied methods originally designed to understand how human infants segment speech and learn words to analyze eight years of humpback whale song recordings. They weren't listening for meaning in the human sense, but for underlying statistical regularities.
Remarkably, they found them. The analysis revealed that sequences of sound elements in whale song exhibit statistically coherent structures, much like words or phrases in human language. Furthermore, the frequency distribution of these "subsequences" follows a distinct pattern known as Zipf's Law: a few units are extremely common, while most are rare, mirroring the distribution of words across all human languages. They also observed Zipf's Law of Brevity – more frequent units tend to be shorter. These aren't trivial findings. In human language, these statistical properties are thought to facilitate learning and efficient communication, arising partly through the pressures of cultural transmission over generations. Discovering analogous structures in humpback whales—a species separated from us by tens of millions of years of evolution but sharing the trait of complex, culturally transmitted vocalizations—hints at potential convergent evolution. It suggests that the demands of learning and faithfully transmitting complex sequences might sculpt communication systems in similar ways, regardless of the species or the medium.
Does this underlying statistical scaffolding mean we can actually "talk" to whales? That remains a profound leap. But another recent encounter, documented by Brenda McCowan, Jodi Frediani, Laurance Doyle, and others in PeerJ and recounted in Frediani's blog for The Safina Center, offers a tantalizing glimpse. In 2021, off the coast of Alaska, researchers conducted a playback experiment. They broadcasted a recorded humpback "whup" call – a sound thought to function as a contact call – into the water.
A 38-year-old female humpback named Twain approached. What followed was extraordinary. Over a 20-minute period, Twain responded to the playback call 33 times. It wasn't just random calling; it was interactive. As the researchers adjusted the timing interval between their broadcasted calls, Twain adjusted her response timing to match, engaging in what the researchers describe as "conversational turn-taking." She seemed to be participating in a genuine, albeit simple, call-and-response exchange. As Dr. McCowan stated, “We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language.’” The fact that Twain was identified as having been present the previous day when the original call was recorded adds another layer of intrigue – was she responding to her own voice, or that of a known companion?
Here, the different perspectives converge beautifully. The statistical structure identified by Arnon, Kirby, Garland et al. provides a potential framework for why such an interaction might even be possible. If whale vocalizations possess learnable, predictable sequence patterns, then the capacity for turn-taking and temporal matching observed with Twain seems less surprising – it relies on recognizing and anticipating sequence boundaries, precisely what the statistical dips might signal.
However, the experience with Twain, a specific, contingent interaction, doesn't negate the profound mystery highlighted by Finer and Mascini. The "conversation" was initiated by humans, using a single recorded call exemplar. Twain’s internal experience, her interpretation of this repeated acoustic ping in her vast world, remains fundamentally unknowable. Was it curiosity? Annoyance? Recognition? A simple social reflex? The encounter is a powerful data point, a spark of apparent connection, but it's a signal flashing against the backdrop of that immense, energetic "silence" Finer and Mascini contemplate – the totality of whale existence and communication that lies beyond our current tools and sensory limits.
Listening for the whale, then, requires navigating between these poles: the search for quantifiable patterns and the acceptance of profound otherness; the thrill of a momentary, interactive response and the humility demanded by the vast, ancient acoustic world of the ocean. We have sophisticated tools analyzing statistical structures, offering clues about the fundamental architecture of their communication. We have moments like the encounter with Twain, suggesting a capacity and perhaps even a willingness to engage. And we have the crucial reminder from works like Silent Whale Letters to keep listening, not just to the sounds we can easily capture and analyze, but also to the resonant spaces in between, acknowledging the deep, complex lives unfolding beneath the waves, much of which will always remain beautifully, profoundly beyond our complete understanding. The quest continues, demanding both scientific rigor and a deep-seated sense of wonder.