Whale songs include a strange range of sounds, from the bowed bass beats of a giant sub-surface fiddle to the feedback squelches of an electric guitar. But we have trouble perceiving the structure by which the sounds are organized because the notes seem cast out in slow motion, with relatively long silences between each unit of sound.

To better appreciate the patterns, we can speed a song up by ten times, allowing us to hear a compressed version that sounds like the song of a bird:

To help see the patterns, we can use color to denote matching units. Here’s the Science cover again, colored according to Payne and McVay’s classification of units:

Different instances of the same unit can vary in length (the yellow units above gradually expand with each repetition), yet share enough sonic traits to be classified as a common unit.

The set of shapes resembles the notation of Gregorian chants written in the tenth century.

Neumatic musical notation from the 10th century

Musical notation becoming more precise from the 10th to 14th centuries

The fluid musical notes of the chants are called “neumes.” They did not represent exact pitches or rhythms, but tendencies of pattern, the same elements McVay and Payne identified in the songs of the whales.

As the tuning of instruments standardized, and music matured to move between one key and another, it became increasingly important that the pitches of notes be indicated more precisely. From the tenth to the fourteenth centuries the neumes evolved into the conventional musical notation we still use today.

Data visualization designer Mike Deal and I figured that if we followed a similar progression of standardization, we could further emphasize the structure of whale song. We created a graphic notation system, where each discrete sound unit in a given population’s shared song is assigned its own stylized shape and color.

Here are the nine units that make up a song recorded by Paul Knapp off the coast of Tortola:

The top row contains individual examples of each unit. The colored glyphs below were created by tracing the “averaged” shapes that resulted from overlaying the many occurrences of the same unit across Knapp’s recording.

Each solid horizontal line in the staves of standard musical notation represents a different number of Hertz along a logarithmic frequency scale. These whale song sonograms share the same logarithmic scale, conveniently allowing us to combine the two visualization contexts.

Because standard musical notation is, in essence, made of timelines of note symbols plotted against a vertical axis of pitch frequencies, we can match the whale sounds to their corresponding frequencies on the musical staves. Hopefully this gives the whale sound shapes a more familiar context.

Here is Knapp’s entire recording mapped out. We see a five-themed song repeating three times in the same song session.

Order a poster of this graphic here

We can apply this approach to any song from the eleven different humpback populations. Here is a song I recorded off the coast of Maui: