Is music the language capable of crossing barriers between species?

Imagine that you are awhaleswimming in the immensity of the sea. Its entire life passes in a kind of perpetual haze, since the light does not penetrate very far into the water and the plankton is sometimes so dense that it darkens even the sunniest day. Under the sea you cannot see your group mates. But you can hear them. And the sounds it produces, which are capable of traveling thousands of kilometers, become its only way of saying “here I am” in the vastness of the ocean.

If you were a whale and suddenly heard the notes of a clarinet, how would you react? Would you be curious and get closer to the sound? Would you play with the rhythm that the musician produces, imitating it? In other words, would you try to communicate with him?

Those were some of the questions posed by the American composer, philosopher and writer.David Rothenberg, author of the bookThousand Mile Song (“The song of a thousand miles”)and his musical CD. And to try to answer them, he decided to undertake a series of trips to Hawaii, Russia and Canada with the aim of submerging a hydrophone in the sea, putting on some headphones, sitting on the rocks on the coast, playing the clarinet live and direct for the whales … and wait for your response.

The fascinating results of these trips and recordings, in which they appearhumpback whales, sperm whales, killer whales and even belugas, will be counted and demonstrated by Rothenberg himself on the nights of November 26 and 27 during his two speeches at CosmoCaixa Madrid and Barcelona, respectively.

The Pavarottis of the sea

What happens inside the mind of a whaleit is an enigma that we have only just begun to investigate. Before the 1960s, no one suspected the existence of whale songs. But its discovery forced us to confirm the possibility of the existence of intelligence in the oceans. Soon after, Scott McVay and Roger Payne made an even more sensational discovery: Humpback whales, in particular, not only sang, they rhymed their songs! In the same way that a human composer plays with syllables, tone, and rhythm, these Pavarottis of the seas manage to compose brocades of musically meaningful notes that annually vary and patch up with what seems like a well-calibrated intention.

What is the purpose of these musical arrangements? It has been proposed that it is a mating tool. But then why is a female never seen approaching a singing male, always suspended upside down? And how do they produce these formidable sounds, if a single bubble is never seen to come out of their body during the song?

“My mission is to cross the sound barrier between species,” says Rothenberg. “And I want to think that on more than one occasion, I noticed that at least one whale responded to the notes of my clarinet, imitating it.” This is especially evident in the songBeluga no Believe in Tears, from the CD that accompanies the book, which was recorded with the belugas from Solovetski Island, in Russia, and which can be heard here. Equally impressive is the dialogue between Rothenberg’s clarinet and two humpbacks,Never Satisfied.

Rothenberg writes: “Making music together with those species with which one cannot speak is a way of crossing cultural barriers. Not because music is a universal language, but because it is a form of fluid and emotional communication, capable of making use of unknown sounds. It is possible that people from different parts of the world, and even from different species, can produce new sounds. And I think this is a very powerful tool for science when it comes to understanding the vocalization of whales. “

Underwater noise

Let us now return to the hypothesis of if you were a whale. He’s listening intently, hoping to spot whales of his kind, but he can only hear the intimidating marine traffic. It’s like trying to listen to a melodious song in the middle of an off-wave radio at high volume. This cacophony of constant mechanical noises is much louder than the other natural sounds of the sea and is among the few things that scare and confuse you.

You close your eyes and listen to the sounds you know by heart, which are amplified to you because the sea is the largest resonance chamber in the world: the thunder of passenger ships, the eerie metallic rumble of giant commercial containers, the hoarse hum of the shrimp boats, the soft purr of the submarines that tried to go unnoticed, the underground trembling of the giant aircraft carriers launching their planes and missiles, … Lately there is another noise that makes her despair. They are the acoustic experiments of the naval forces of some countries, which consist of launching pulses of sound at 235 decibels, as intense as the engines of a lunar rocket.

And at birth, the first singsong he heard in his life was not his mother’s voice but that of some cargo ship crossing the Panama Canal. Sometimes you wonder what the ocean of your great-great-grandparents would be like, when there were not all those noises and, thanks to special conditions of temperature and salinity, the calls of the blue whales could travel from one pole to the other.

The pollution generated by underwater noise gives special urgency to experiments like Rothenberg’s, which seek to explore communication between species. And it also accentuates Roger Payne’s beautiful phrase: “That’s what whales do: they give the ocean a voice.”

Angela Posada-Swafford