I was able to spend time again this fall on the island of Moorea, near Tahiti in French Polynesia, to observe humpback whales. While photography was the main objective, I was on the lookout for opportunities to record whalesong as well. As in 2024, I am indebted to Pierre Serreli for his guidance and help in the water with the whales as well as Captain Temana for his excellent boat handling and assistance. We were hampered by high winds many days but Pierre and Temana worked hard to find our own water and with patience we found plenty of cooperative and interested whales including several singers.
Since the worldwide humpback whalesong evolves from year to year it is worth recording the song for posterity each season. We had good success with 2024’s Humpback Whale Song but I was hopeful we could record an even cleaner rendition this year. I am neither a sound engineer nor particularly knowledgeable about underwater acoustics. I simply want to obtain a clear, accurate and lengthy record I can share with the world. Finding ideal conditions to record humpback whalesong is challenging: solitude is necessary (so that noise from passing boats does not disturb the whale or the recording) as is agreeable weather. We don’t really need clean water since the objective is not to photograph the whale but it is nice to be able to at least see the whale as it hovers in the water column singing. However, finding a singer is the principal challenge since they tend to be solitary and are always underwater for long periods of time. We had a fantastic singer on our first day this season but high winds and swell meant the hydrophone was not stationary in the water so there was some noise in the recording. Later in the week we found a cooperative singer in relatively calm water with no one else around and I made the recording I was hoping for over the course of about 90 minutes. I made some tweaks from my in-water technique of last year and I think the resulting recording this year has a better signal-to-noise ratio and virtually no splashing or swimming noises. This recording captures the greater part of three successive song cycles, with some repeated patterns clearly evident if you listen to the entirety of it. There are many interesting passages but I think my favorite begins about 08:17 – check it out! (The same passage is repeated almost perfectly at 23:40.)
Cheers, and thanks for looking!
Below is what a section of the song looks like. Some of the patterns become very recognizable when viewed in software such as Audacity rather than heard. The colorful tracks are a view of the frequency spectrum (which I don’t find particularly useful) while the purple tracks below each spectrum are the waveforms. In this case, at the passage starting about 08:05, we see a transition from “burps” (of which there are five or six, each followed by a small sound) into two long series of rapid “chirps”. There is a small amount of island reverb between the chirp passages.
