Voices of Humpback Whales: A New History of Whale Song Science, 1856–1986 Available to Purchase

The release of Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1970 helped galvanize a torrent of North American activism to save the whale from commercial whaling. Whale song quickly became a cornerstone of environmentalist and New Age political culture. This article places humpback whale song science in the larger context of acoustic science and technology, arguing that the history of whale song science is a history of the voice. Recovering and drawing on an array of sources—from sound recordings, to whaling narratives, to archived research notebooks, correspondence, and funding reports—this article seeks to place whale song science in an interdisciplinary context that binds acoustic and naval engineers, speech scientists, ornithologists, and cetologists together in a web of vocal technologies, techniques, and representational formats. Blending these stories into a single narrative, this article broadens the historiography of whale song science by placing it back into the hands, eyes, and ears of the diverse workers who generated the conditions of its possibilities and sustained its development–from academic scientists and sonar engineers to research assistants and whalemen.