Science and Creativity: Do Animals Have Culture? Part II

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2018

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

Biologist Roger Payne discovered whale song when he started studying a mysterious recording in 1966. The recording came from a sound designer doing military research, Frank Watlington, who was trying to record undersea dynamite explosions.Payne became obsessed with the recording, and made a startling discovery: the sounds were repeating. That means that they were scientifically classified as songs. Over the following years, Payne pressed the recordings on musicians, composers, and singers, including Judy Collins.

In 1970, Collins used the recordings on her album Whales and Nightingales, which went gold and introduced millions to whale song. Collins devoted the royalties of those songs to Payne’s conservation work. Just as Payne hoped, these strange, evocative sounds inspired the growing Save the Whales movement, and by 1972 the US had banned whaling and whale products. Plus, “seasons” of whale songs. Researchers looking at how the songs of whales change over time have learned that a new song can catch on and spread across populations of thousands whales in a matter of months, in much the same way that a hit song spreads across a country. Biologist Ellen Garland joins us in the studio to tell us more about that.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From PRX.
0:08.1	This is Studio 360.
0:10.4	I'm Kurti Anderson.
0:13.6	On this podcast Extra, we sometimes present stories about science and creativity.
0:19.0	This time, it's part two of a three-part series about
0:22.4	animals being creative. Only one species, other than humans, has ever had a hit record album.
0:31.7	Not a bird. I personally do love birdsong, and we all tend to take them and their music for granted.
0:39.0	But when whales were first recorded, they broke big.
0:49.1	I remember as a kid in the 1960s putting that first record of whales songs on the turntable.
0:56.1	Typical playlist at the time, Simon Agarfuncle, Creedens Clearwater, humpback whales.
1:02.0	Those late 60s humpback whale recordings really did revolutionize how we all thought about those
1:09.2	animals and how we think about other species in general.
1:13.5	Michael May has our story.
1:15.9	This I've always thought was the best recorded song.
1:19.7	That's biologist Roger Payne.
1:21.8	He's at home in landlocked Vermont,
1:24.1	listening to the songs of his beloved humpback whales
1:26.8	in a wood-paneled living room.
1:31.3	And that sort of theme evolves as the whale sings it.
1:40.3	These sounds are, with no exception that I can think of the most evocative, most beautiful sounds
1:46.8	made by any animal on earth.
1:49.2	Payne began his career studying the sounds made by bats and maws.
	...

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