of intentions as they compose and sing,and how they experience their
own and other whales’ songs.In deep water,when the sea is calm and
singing whales are a certain distance away,all the sounds are resonant
and followed by echoes—from the bottom of the sea,from the walls of
underwater mountains,and from the undersurface of waves.Questions
arise as to whether the acoustic properties have anything to do with their
selection of singing places,whether they value an amplifying environ-
ment,and/or whether they make choices when singing and listening on
the basis of the song’s aesthetic quality as they perceive it.From the per-
spective of a person interested in music,these are important questions,
but we may never be able to answer them fully.Note
1.My impression that the overlapping of songs is random has not been systematically
examined.It would be hard to examine because when more than one male is singing,the
singers tend to be rather far apart.The time of arrival of a whale’s utterance at the ears of
each of his separated listeners will differ slightly,depending on their distance from him,
making an intention toward unison or any particular kind of polyphony hard to detect.
What I noticed during many months of listening was that when more than one whale was
singing,their progress through the song was almost always asynchronous.It was unusual
even to hear parts of the same theme being sung by two whales at the same time,and even
rarer to hear two whales change from one theme to the next simultaneously.References
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Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology8:105–116.150 Katharine Payne