The ocean isn't a quiet place. We like to think of it as a silent blue void, but that's just a failure of human hearing. Down there, it's a cacophony. I’ve spent years dropping hydrophones into the cold Atlantic waters, capturing the clicks, groans, and haunting whistles of humpbacks. These aren't just noises. They’re complex, rhythmic, and incredibly emotional. When I brought these recordings to my local choir, I didn't expect them to change the way we think about music. I just wanted them to listen.
Instead, we built a song together. We didn't just sing "about" the ocean. We sang with it.
Most environmental art feels like a lecture. You sit in a gallery or a concert hall and feel guilty about plastic straws. This was different. By integrating actual whale vocalizations into a four-part choral arrangement, we bridged a gap between species. It turns out that a humpback’s low-frequency moan sits right in the pocket of a human baritone. It’s haunting. It’s also a technical challenge that most musicians never get to tackle.
Why Whale Sounds Are Actually Music
Science backs up what our ears told us during those first rehearsals. In 1971, Roger Payne and Scott McVay published a paper in Science titled "Songs of Humpback Whales." They discovered that these animals follow specific laws of composition. They use rhyme. They have themes and variations. They even follow a beat.
When you listen to a recording of a whale, you're hearing a sentient being make creative choices. They iterate. One whale starts a "hit" song, and by the end of the season, the entire pod is singing it. Sometimes, pods hundreds of miles away pick up the tune. It's the original viral trend.
My choir had to learn how to mimic these frequencies. We weren't just singing notes on a staff. We were matching the glissando of a creature that weighs thirty tons. Human voices are surprisingly good at this. We found that the female sopranos could mirror the high-pitched "chirps" while the basses handled the resonant "thumps" that you feel in your chest more than you hear in your ears.
The Technical Mess of Mixing Species
You can't just press play on a whale recording and sing over it. It sounds messy. To make this work, our director had to treat the whale as the lead soloist. We had to tune our entire performance to the whale’s natural pitch, which varies based on water temperature and depth.
We used a specific recording I took off the coast of Newfoundland. In that clip, a single male humpback was singing a solitary theme. It was clean. No boat noise. No interference. We mapped his "song" onto a musical grid.
- Step One: Pitch correction. We didn't change the whale; we changed the choir. We tuned our A to 432Hz instead of the standard 440Hz because it felt more "organic" with the sea sounds.
- Step Two: Temporal alignment. Whales don't care about a 4/4 time signature. They breathe when they need to. Our choir had to learn a "reactive" style of singing, watching the waveforms on a screen to know when to swell.
- Step Three: Textural blending. We used "oo" and "ah" vowel sounds that mimicked the flow of water. We avoided hard consonants. "K" and "T" sounds felt like gravel in a silk machine.
The result wasn't a "song" in the traditional sense. it was a soundscape. It was an immersive experience that made the audience feel like they were submerged.
The Emotional Weight of Interspecies Art
People cried. I’m not saying that to brag about our singing. They cried because they realized the "voice" they were hearing was real. It wasn't a synthesizer. It was a living, breathing mammal that has lived in our oceans for millions of years.
There's a specific type of loneliness that comes with being human. We think we’re the only ones who talk. But when a choir of thirty humans harmonizes with a recording of a humpback, that loneliness disappears for a second. You realize we’re part of a much larger, much louder family.
The whale I recorded was likely hundreds of miles away when I caught his voice. He was alone in the dark. In that concert hall, he had a room full of people answering him back. It’s a powerful way to advocate for ocean conservation without saying a single word about policy or statistics. You protect what you love. You love what you understand. And you understand things a lot better when you’ve spent months learning how to sing like them.
Stop Making Boring Environmental Art
If you’re a creative person, stop making art that talks down to people. Don't show me another picture of a bleached reef and expect me to feel something new. Use the data. Use the sounds.
If you want to try this yourself, you don't need a professional hydrophone right away. There are incredible open-source libraries of marine life recordings. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has a live soundscape you can listen to right now.
Take those sounds. Put them in your DAW. Write a melody that flows around them.
Don't try to dominate the natural sound. Let it lead.
We’re planning our next project now. We’re looking at the sounds of melting glaciers—which sounds like a thousand tiny bells ringing at once. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful. It’s also a perfect soprano line.
Go download a recording of a Weddell seal. Or a snapping shrimp. Or a humpback. Bring it to your band, your choir, or just your own bedroom studio. Stop looking at the ocean as a resource or a vacation spot. Start looking at it as a collaborator. You’ll find that the best music has already been written; we’re just late to the rehearsal.
Start by listening to the MBARI live stream for twenty minutes. Don't do anything else. Just listen to the rhythms. You’ll hear the patterns. Once you hear them, you won't be able to stop yourself from humming along. That’s where the song begins.
