Cetaceans in music: albums, songs, works

Whale song in music

From the founding album Songs of the Humpback Whale (Roger Payne, 1970), which set off the Save the Whales movement, to Pink Floyd, Lou Reed and many others: cetaceans have deeply influenced the music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

“Songs of the Humpback Whale”: the birth of a planetary cause

In 1970 the American biologist Roger Payne and the sound engineer Scott McVay released “Songs of the Humpback Whale“, a vinyl record that went platinum and revealed the structured songs of humpback whales to the general public for the first time. The National Geographic Society distributed 10 million copies of it as an insert in 1979, an outright record for a scientific recording.

The cultural effect was massive: Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young worked these songs into their compositions. Alan Hovhaness wrote And God Created Great Whales in 1970, combining orchestra and recordings of whales. In 1977 two humpback whale songs travelled aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 probes on the Golden Record, humanity’s message to any extraterrestrial civilisations.

Also worth exploring

Cetacean culture goes well beyond music: fiction films, documentaries, cetaceans and human culture and cetological quotations.