Roger Payne had a background in bat and owlecholocation, but his interest in whale vocalizations came about circuitously. In the late 1960s he heard on the radio that a dead whale had washed up on Revere Beach so he drove out to see it. He found that souvenir hunters had already hacked off the flukes from the deadporpoise, somebody had carved their initials in its side, and a cigar butt had been stuffed into its blowhole.
“I removed the cigar and stood there for a long time with feelings I cannot describe. Everybody has some such experience that affects him for life, probably several. That night was mine.” - Roger Payne
In 1966, Payne heard about the whale recordings of Frank Watlington, a Navy engineer who eight years earlier had captured eerie underwater moaning and wailing sounds while manning a top-secret hydrophone station off the coast of Bermuda, listening for Russian submarines. Payne asked for and received copies of the recordings, and soon made the startling discovery that the songs repeated themselves, exactly. The shortest songs were in the six-minute range and the longest were over 30 minutes, and these could be repeated continuously for up to 24 hours. When the sounds were graphed they displayed a definite structure. Subsequent research by Payne and his then-wife Katharine Payne discovered that all whales in a given ocean sing the same song. Further, the whale songs change subtly from year-to-year, but never went back to previous songs. Katy further discovered that the longer songs sung by the whales used the equivalent of “rhyming,” with key structures repeating at intervals. This raises the possibility that the whales use mnemonic devices to help them remember the more complicated songs. The 1979 Vol. 155, No. 1, and possibly also an earlier 1969 issue described only in a 2007 web page which cites no further source, issue or issues of National Geographic included a flexible plastic disc with a sample of the recordings. According to the mentioned website, this had a role to play in the popularization of the album.
Reception
The album was an unexpected smash hit, quickly selling over 100,000 copies and eventually going multi-platinum, and was followed in 1977 by Deep Voices - The Second Whale Record, which also included sounds of blue whales and right whales. Excerpts from the record have shown up in songs by Judy Collins, Léo Ferré, Kate Bush and piece by Glass Wave in the symphonic suiteAnd God Created Great Whales by Alan Hovhaness, on the Voyager Gold Record which was carried aboard the Voyager program spaceships, and in the movie . In 1989 excerpts from "Solo Whale" were used to create the sound effects for the rose form of the monsterBiollante in the 1989 Toho film Godzilla vs. Biollante. Numerous other recordings of Humpback and other whales have attempted to capitalize on its popularity. In 2010 the album was inducted into the National Recording Registry as one of the significant recordings that "are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States."
