TRANSCRIPT
This is a recording from the Oceanic Project of whales singing to each other.
(AUDIO - Whale song)
It's not exactly karaoke.
These whale songs have been a source of fascination for decades.
Professor Coen Elemans from the University of Southern Denmark is among a group of scientists who have been studying how these sounds are made.
"There is about 18 species of whales, large baleen whales right now. And all of these make very low frequency sounds. Some of these we can barely hear, very low frequency hums... People have known that whales make sounds since the seventies, roughly. And since then people have been wondering, how do they do this? Actually, how do they make sounds?"
The Professor is part of a team that's just published new research on whale singing in the journal, Nature.
In the study, scientists studied the voice boxes, or larynxes, from three dead, stranded whales - a humpback, minke and sei - which are all types of baleen whales.
They took these voice boxes back to their laboratory and blew air through them under controlled conditions, to see what tissues might vibrate.
Computer models of the whale’s vocalisations were also created, and matched to recordings of similar whales taken in the wild.
Professor Elemans says they now believe whales have a specialised voice box that other animals don't have.
"We've now shown that their larynx, their voice box still works as a sound source, but it works in very different ways as we use it."
Whale expert Joy Reidenberg says since the whale voice boxes tested were from juvenile whales, further experiments in adult males - who do the singing - would be needed to confirm the research.
Professor Patrick Miller from the University of St Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit says the study was too tiny to be definitive.
But he says it's still important research.
"It's a very impressive piece of work that tackles a question that we've had for decades, essentially in marine mammal science, which is how do these baleen whales produce the sounds that they make?"
Elemans is keen to keep studying the whales.
He says the singing is not for entertainment - it clearly plays a vital role.
"We have to realise that the only way for these animals to communicate on the water is by noise, by sound. The only way for them to find each other is by sound. So if we add a bunch of noise to the oceans, basically on a global scale, this will really reduce the areas of which these animals can communicate and make it harder for them to find each other."
