Back story: sings like a bird.

In a new study, researchers built on what they know about birdsong to analyze humpback whale songs. The waveforms and spectrograms below represent portions of a birdsong and a whale song extracted from recordings on file at Cornell's Macaulay Library

House wren

A house wren's song has structure, combining its elements into the distinctive, repeated patterns visible at right. Bursts of sound appear as dark shapes on the waveform (where bigger means louder) and colored marks on the spectrogram (which shows frequency). Correlating song patterns with behavior has helped researchers understand the function of these songs.

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Humpback whale

A male humpback whale's song shows structure too. Songs tend to be lower pitched and more drawn out (note frequency and timestamp scales) but still contain repeating patterns. Humpbacks in the same ocean basin often sing the same patterns, which shift like musical fads during breeding season. Overall, understanding whale song function has been difficult.

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