Study
Songs of Humpback Whales
Payne, R. S.; McVay, S.
Science, 1971
Long hydrophone recordings of humpback whales were converted to spectrograms and examined for repeating structure across many minutes.
- Studied in
- Megaptera novaeangliae
- Sample size
- hydrophone recordings analysed as spectrograms
The sounds are organised hierarchically and repeat: units combine into phrases, phrases repeat to form themes, and themes occur in a consistent order to form a song that a whale may repeat for hours.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Humpback vocalisation constitutes song in the technical sense — long, patterned, hierarchically organised and repeated.
How NatureHQ reads it
The paper that created the subject, and it did so by looking rather than listening: the structure is not audible across the timescale it occurs on, and only became visible when hours of sound were laid out as an image. That is worth carrying because it is the first appearance of a pattern that runs through this whole field — the analysis reveals structure a human ear cannot hold, and revealing structure is not the same as revealing meaning.
- Descriptive: no function is established.
- A small number of recordings from a limited area and period.
- Hierarchical structure in a signal is a statement about its form and implies nothing about content.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: American Association for the Advancement of SciencePublished in Science or Science Advances (AAAS).
doi.org/10.1126/science.173.3997.585
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-31.