#PICTURES OF MICROPHONES AND MUSIC NOTES FULL VERSION#

One of his favorite moments is featured on his CD ' Whale Music.' He also mentions that whale songs are sometimes far stranger than most people think. Often they just ignore me, but in the best of moments, and such a moment is just as rare as playing along with human musicians, some real contact may happen.

There I am, making a strange sound and sending it out underwater, just hoping a whale might connect what he sings to what IвЂ™m playing. Most times when I drop my microphone and speaker underwater to play with the whales, I feel awfully lonely. In The New York Times he describes his quest to send clarinet songs beneath the waves and accompany the humpback whales as they sing. He not only records and attempts to notate their songs, but sometimes he tries to play along. RothenbergвЂ™s relationship with whales is a unique one. The system makes repeated patterns more obvious to human ears as we listen along to a humpback whale song Rothenberg recorded off of the Maui Coast in March 2010.

#PICTURES OF MICROPHONES AND MUSIC NOTES FULL VERSION#

The full version is featured in RotenbergвЂ™s article and is available in DealвЂ™s online shop: Michael Deal HereвЂ™s a small snippet of a full song recorded by Paul Knapp Jr. ' We created a graphic notation system, where each discrete sound unit in a given populationвЂ™s shared song is assigned its own stylized shape and color,' Rothenberg writes.В The duo's music and design effort is available in a newly-released album. The shapes traced by Payne and McVay already resembledВ notation from Gregorian chants inВ the 10th century, so Rothenberg and Deal pushed the shapes a little farther. Recently Rothenberg, a musician, teamed up with visual designer, Michael DealВ toВ translate whale songs into musical notation. Scientists now understand how songs are passed from creature to creature over the distance of vast ocean basins and give each of the 11В populations of humpbacks around the world a unique song. But the analysis of whale song has only grown richer since then. That original work was published in Science in August 1971. The team traced the sonograms by hand to gain a more simplified version of the structure and devised a notation system.

Rothenberg describes how aВ network of underwater microphones originally built to detect Soviet submarineВ first brought whale songs to the ears and minds of whale scientist Roger Payne and assistant Scott McVay.В When McVay layed out the printed sonograms (which map pitch and texture of sound) on his living room floor, his mathematician wife, Hella McVay, saw the structure of the cetaceansвЂ™ calls.

The soaring, ocean-wide song of humpback whales is often likened to music, but when researchers first started analyzing the clicks, moans and cries, it took the eye of a mathematician to spot a pattern, writesВ David Rothenberg at Medium.

Pictures of microphones and music notes