In Listening to Beauty: Rhetorics of Science in Sea and Sound, Megan Poole invites us into a moving study of how encounters with beauty advance scientific study. We are delighted to share a brief excerpt from the book below.

I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me . . . and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land is visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s. . . . Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? . . . . I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must need exist after all humane ages are over.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Evolutionarily, whales are our ancestors. They filled the ocean with song tens of millions of years before human animals came onto the stage. Of course, for Melville, Leviathan was anything but a musician. Leviathan was ancient, antemosaic, and—Melville was sure—Leviathan was certain to live after us, considering that whales seemed a death sentence to anyone who gave chase. Indeed, one thing Melville never attributed to Leviathan was song.

Nevertheless, this particular passage of Moby-Dick may set the stage for human listeners to open their ears to the music of nature. Here, “Saturn’s grey chaos” roared across the cosmic chronos. Now, a quick trip to YouTube allows us to hear the rings of the planet Saturn as they hum and creak in their cyclical revolution round the cold orb, like a subway train approaching its station—the sound of ice crystals and sand intermixing. In the passage, too, whales gently rolled across the abyss, filling the circumference of the world over with their spouts of breath and breeching crashes. Now hydrophone recordings enable us to hear their deep moans, guttural clicks, and screeches reminiscent of laughter as they reverberate hundreds of miles across the deep.

The whir of Saturn’s rings and the echoes of the whale’s cry fill the world with sound from the unlikeliest of places, each ‘song’ covering a different end of the universe’s dark depths. And at least the songs of the humpback whale follow the rhyme, rhythm, and phrasing patterns similar to human musical compositions, a resonance that brings biologist Roger Payne to wonder whether these sounds derive from a shared ancestor “tens if not hundreds of millions of years old,” an ancestry that would make the melodies that sometimes spill from our lungs “thousands of times older than we are.” And if that’s the case, Roger Payne asks, “Is it possible that the universe sings?”

Traditional scientific methods offer biologists no way to answer such a question—whales and song do not quite fit the bill for subject-under-study in a laboratory. Even the first report published in Science in 1971 about the songs of the humpback whale introduced the phenomenon as “a series of surprisingly beautiful sounds.” That scientific attention was here directed by beauty is important. What this case study offers—a case in which scientific study cannot so neatly be contained in the lab—is how biologists might attune themselves to nonhuman ways of knowing in natural environments and how engaging these “surprisingly” aesthetic moments may move biologists beyond logical paradigms and into feeling nature’s impositions.

Since the 1970s, Roger Payne has written extensively about whale songs, and in his recollections, stories of Katy Payne, his spouse at the time, play a key, yet subtle role. While Roger Payne spent his days observing whales, Katy Payne recalls spending her days “chasing children.” What Roger Payne does not narrate, and what Payne recalled in our interview is that as she “chased children,” she poured over spectrograms in her spare moments to view the structure of whale songs and played the recordings of humpback whales on repeat throughout the house.

Through the sustained practice of intensive, ambient listening over many years, Payne began to realize that these sounds were repeating, rhyming, and changing in relation to one another. In short, it was Katy Payne who performed deep analysis of the recordings, came to consider the whales as composers, and determined that whales were not just sounding, but singing in response to one another.

Of course, Payne’s contributions to the scientific annals would come to be defined as the “sensitive” work needed to decipher the songs of the humpback whale. Not often theorized beyond a gendered way of knowing, I find Payne’s “sensitive” approach as a fully embodied mode of listening to the affective force of impositions from natural environments. This approach is perhaps best learned from Payne herself.

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When Payne invited me into her living room, instructed me to sit, and began to play the songs of the humpback whale over surround-sound speakers, I was confronted with sounds that have been known to move people to tears. Payne, along with former research biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay, would bring these songs to public attention in 1970 with the release of the vinyl album, Songs of the Humpback Whale. The album, released prior to scientific research on whale songs, would sell over 30 million copies, becoming the best-selling environmental album in history and attracting the attention of musicians like Pete Seeger.

The album’s impact would spark international whale conservation efforts as well as contribute to the organization of Greenpeace. Musician and philosopher of music David Rothenberg marks the album as one that made human animals stand at attention: “When [we] first heard these sounds, our sense of whales suddenly changed. It is the song of the humpback whale that made us take notice and care about these animals—the largest that have ever lived on Earth. We would never have been inspired to try and save the whale without being touched by its song.” No exaggeration, then, to say that whale songs changed how humans understood the chorus of the sea.

Roger Payne, however, did not always study whales. Instead, he studied echolocation in bats and owls’ ability to localize sound due to the asymmetry of their skulls. His focus would shift in the late 1960s, the year he read Moby-Dick. The literary origins of his scientific work are not ones that he remembers. Instead, it is Katy Payne who remembers how that book shifted their life’s work. “He wouldn’t say it started with [Moby-Dick], but I remember that it started when he was reading that,” Katy Payne recalls. “And he just . . . swallowed [the book].”

One particular passage on conservation, Payne reports, was especially memorable. Near the end of the novel, Melville begins to doubt whether the seemingly eternal Leviathan can withstand the onset of the whaling industry and humanity’s brute force. As Melville writes:

The moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless, a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Roger Payne ruminated on the passage for quite some time and finally exclaimed, “Well nobody knows anything about whales. Let’s go find out.”

In 1967, the two would venture into the Atlantic to listen to the recordings of Navy engineer Frank Watlington. In 1971, Roger Payne would publish “Songs of Humpback Whales” with Scott McVay, a researcher who once studied the cognitive minds of dolphins under the tutelage of John Lilly. Before their article, which graced the cover of Science, scientists were aware that whales made “short broad-band clicks, longer narrowband squeals, and complex sounds.” Roger Payne and McVay were the first to show that these sounds were actually composed as songs, presenting in Science the entirety of a 30-minute whale song in which they identify fixed patterns and repetitive phrases therein.

The Paynes and McVay met unique challenges in studying the songs of the humpback whale because these songs bring biologists to the limits of scientific experimental methods. Without the ability to study their subjects in a laboratory setting, their only option was to pursue and observe the whales by boat, record their songs with a hydrophone, and create visual representations of the songs with spectrograms. Spectrogramsare the visual representation of a signal’s frequencies over time—in this case, the pattern of a whale song. As Roger Payne recalls, “[Studying whales] is a lot like astronomy . . . you can never perform an experiment but must wait for nature to present you with something interesting to observe.”

The moment the Paynes first listened to the songs of the humpback whale would mark a moment so profound that it would spur on the research fields of bioacoustics and animal communication. Yet somehow Katy Payne has no memory of what thoughts or questions emerged as she listened to whale songs for the first time. Or perhaps I should say that there is no memory she can put into words, only the bodily mark she performs when she stretches her hands to reach for the corners of the room and sighs, “Ahhhh.” Awe. When I pushed Payne further to articulate her method of inquiry, to name what it feels like to hear whales sing, she said, “I can. But I’m going to make you do it.”

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Megan Poole is assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

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