Oldest Whale Song Ever Recorded Reveals Ocean’s Past Noise Levels

The haunting song of a humpback whale, captured off the coast of Bermuda in March 1949, has been identified as the oldest known recording of its kind, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) announced this month.

The recording was discovered on a fragile audograph disc within WHOI’s archival collections and digitized by Mass Productions. At the time, scientists aboard the research vessel R/V Atlantis were conducting acoustic experiments for the U.S. Office of Naval Research, testing sonar systems and measuring explosive volumes. The whale song was an unintended, yet remarkably preserved, byproduct of that research.

“Data from this time period simply don’t exist in most cases,” said Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustician and senior research specialist at WHOI. The discovery offers a rare glimpse into the ocean soundscape of the late 1940s, a period before significant increases in human-generated ocean noise.

The finding predates Roger Payne’s landmark 1971 publication detailing the complex songs of humpback whales by nearly two decades. Payne’s work is widely credited with popularizing the understanding of whale song and galvanizing the early whale conservation movement.

Peter Tyack, a marine bioacoustician and emeritus research scholar at WHOI, emphasized the significance of the recording beyond the whale’s song itself. “The ocean of the late 1940s was much quieter than the ocean of today, providing a different backdrop than scientists are used to hearing for whale song,” he said. The recovered recordings allow researchers to understand both whale sounds and the ocean soundscape as it existed then, a reconstruction that is otherwise extremely difficult.

Researchers believe comparing the 1949 recording to contemporary ocean soundscapes will help them better understand how increased shipping noise and other human-made sounds affect whale communication and behavior. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research has already established that whales adjust their calling behavior in response to environmental noise.

The recording was made using a crude hydrophone and a dictating machine, a far cry from the sophisticated acoustic monitoring technology available today. The audograph disc, a type of plastic disc created by a Gray Audograph, proved to be a more durable recording medium than the tape technology of the era, allowing the sounds to survive for over seventy years. The recording was rediscovered and digitized in 2025.

WHOI researchers have not yet announced plans for further analysis of the 1949 recording, or a public release of the digitized audio.