to listen and hold our differences across disciplinary and cultural divides
This project is a call to action
LISTENING WITH WHALES
Listening With Whales is a multi-layered digital project that invites people to explore whale and other cetaceans – including their songs, calls, and echolocation clicks – as both a site of knowledge and a call to reimagine human-ocean relations.
In doing so, we will also endorse calls from within and outside biology to acknowledge that whale and dolphin vocal behaviours potentially have multiple functions and motivations that do not necessarily fit within dominant heteronormative or reprosexual paradigms.
This online platform functions simultaneously as a research tool and a community meeting ground where multiple ways of knowing converge, including scientific analysis, artistic and musical explorations, ethnographic work, and public engagement.
we are co-creating this space to learn to hold and celebrate our differences and work together to create a better future.
Songlines of the Whales, recordings of East Australian Humpback Whales recorded by the Oceania Project (2026), and featured in WAILS: Songs for Grief (2024).
New Songs of the Humpback Whale recordings of humpback whales in Maui, Tonga, and Madagascar (David Rothenberg & Michael Deal, 2015)
Songs of the Humpback Whale, best selling nature recording of all time, featuring recordings of humpbacks off the coast of Bermuda (Roger Payne in 1970).
The Ocean Alliance Acoustic Library offers access to some of the oldest humpbacks’ recordings available and they share the files freely for educational and artistic purposes.
A longer recording offered by the CornellLab’s Macaulay Library.
This is a just a small sample of albums, learn more comprehensively about human-whale musicking & listening with a historical ear, and other forms of listening with humpbacks throughout the website.
While we strive to offer specificity about individuals, most recordings don’t offer identifying informations of individual whales. This is partially due to the difficulty of knowing who is the specific whale singing in the water, and partially because it took a long time to create an archive of whales flukes and tails (which is how they are identified). Check out for example, Naming Humpbacks (NOA) & the large archive hosted by Happy Whale of individual whales where you can submit your own picture to identify who you have met at sea.
Explore OrcaSound‘s best Southern Resident recordings, of the J, K, and L pods; and learn more about the Bigg’s here. Learn more about individual orcas and so much more at the orca behavioral institute.
Tahlequah (J35) is a matriarch in the J pod and many listened with her and her pod’s grief when she lost Tali and other calves, which led many people to erosically attune to them. Many of the orcas who were kept in captivity in parks in the United States were violently captured in the Puget sound and were part of these three pods.
Learn more about the wide array of Southern Residents’ Echolocating Clicks and more generally about all of the different sounds at this catalogue.
Each pod has unique dialects and thus this is a very limited list of resources.
Live Orcas in the Puget Sound and explore the hydrophone (under water microphones) network here.
Orcas and First Nations, Indigenous, and Aboriginal people have live and lived in close kinship for long generations. While many of their shared songs are not recorded or readily available, they exist and have been sung for many generations. Learn, for example, about the Lummi people’s kinship with orcas, their rituals, songs, advocacy for them.
From 1979 to 2014, Jim Nollman organized regular jam sessions between musicians and orcas, who usually would show up around 9.30 pm. Here is more about the history of Interspecies and albums of these musical encounters.
Also check out David Rothenberg’s Whale Music (2008) &Who Knows Why Whale Sing (2022), both of which contain tracks with orcas (killer whales), humpbacks, and belugas.
While we strive to offer specificity and as much information as possible, while we have a ton of recordings available of the Southern Residents, many of the other pods are currently less researched. Learn more about the different orca pods and populations here & more on how to identify them.
Short- and long-finned pilot whales express themselves through a large variety of clicks, whistles, burst pulses and other vocalizations. The available material online is still quite limited but the Cascadia Research Collective offers some recordings of their language and Alex South drew a helpful score to trace the large variety of sounds that comprise their communication.
In 2023, a large pod of 55 whales stranded together in the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland. Alex South, together with Sam Gare, Aya Kobayashi, Katherine Wren, and Nerea Bello, created Keening–Songs of the Standings in 2025, a ritual to memorialize their lives and deaths, and help the community heal from the loss. This included the making of 55 sand sculptures of pilot whales, who then were washed away by the tide as group keened and walked in a procession around the sand whales. Learn more about rituals and ancestral connections with whales here.
Pilot whales live in large pods that stay together for their whole lives. Their study is currently advancing at a quicker speed but the recordings of their communication is not yet readily available online.
Max is a PhD Candidate in History at Brown University. Their research focuses on whales, dolphins, and the sensory history of oceanic environments. Their dissertation – “Oceanic Listening: Sound, Cetaceans, and the History of Sensory Environments” – explores how sound has mediated human-cetacean relationships over the past 200 years across extractive, scientific, and aesthetic contexts. “Oceanic Listening” spans histories of whaling labor, dolphin captivity and echolocation research, relationships between marine bioacoustics and U.S. imperialism, and representations of whale song in popular culture. They have published research on the history of fish bioacoustics and ocean noise pollution in Environmental History and on the history of humpback whale song science in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. They are also interested in disability studies and the environmental history of disability activism in the 20th-century United States.
Marie Comuzzo is a musicologist, environmental activist, and multimedia artist. Their research examines how sound mediates the relationship between humans and whales and the political power that recognizing whales’ vocalization as music had in multispecies kinship within and beyond Western imaginaries. To learn more, check out their chapter “Listening with Whales: From Silence to Song,” and a the shorter post “How Kētos became Whale: Oceanic Cosmologies in Sky and Sea.” Marie is Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow and Listening with Whales is part of their project. They hold a Master’s in Musicology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Master’s in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Musicology from Brandeis University. They also study fatphobia in classical music. Among other things, Marie is an avid gardener, writes poetry, plays violins, makes mosaics, and learns from Zenobia, a queenly feline who choses to live with her.
Dr Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp is a UK-based curator, writer and producer across visual arts and performance for many cultural organisations, including Spike Island, Bristol; Hauser & Wirth Somerset; SLQS Gallery, London; Cove Park, Scotland; DAS, Amsterdam; CCA, Glasgow; Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam; and In Between Time, Bristol. Florence’s Techne-funded doctoral research (2020-2025) considered the ethics of interspecies relations in contemporary art and performance from an intersectional perspective. Her curatorial approach aims to facilitate more ethical encounters with other species, centring inclusion, and embracing performance methods to encourage alternative modes of attention to the nonhuman world. As the recipient of the Spike Island and Hauser and Wirth Engagement Fellowship for South West-based Curators 2025-2026, Florence curated the year-long engagement programme Ecotones: Where the Urban & Rural Embrace. In 2025 she was awarded a grant by the Culture & Animals Foundation, New York, to curate the programme Interspecies Entanglements for SLQS London. Florence’s writing has been commissioned by artists and galleries internationally, including SLQS Gallery, London; Co-Prosperity, Chicago; Handmark, Australia; and K-Gold Temporary Gallery, Greece. Her book Interspecies Performance, co-edited with Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, was published in 2024 by Performance Research Books.
Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp
(she/her)
Curator & Interspecies Thinker
Co-author of Listening with Whales Artistically
Skye (Xinyi) Gao is a creative technologist, designer, and multi-disciplinary artistcurrently based in Boston, MA. Her work spans across interactive experience, multimedia installations, creative computing, and bio-inspired design. Driven by a deep engagement with technology, Skye finds herself at the nexus of human, artificial, and natural intelligence. Her most recent research interest resides in how advanced computational systems can reshape human experiences and understanding from a more-than-human perspective. Beyond her speculative explorations, Skye also addresses pressing social and cultural phenomena, reflecting on the juxtaposition of memory, life, death in the digital era and its implications for (post) human conditions. Skye holds a Master of Design Studies (MDes) degree at Harvard Graduate of Design with a concentration in medium/technology and a B.Sc in Interactive Media Arts from NYU Shanghai.
Tessel Janse combines her background in art history with post- and decolonial thought and human-animal studies. She works as an educator and art critic and is currently based in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on contemporary forms of colonialism that work through, and upon, relations of interdependence between humans and animals, looking towards art as a method for developing decolonial interspecies ecologies. Her recent PhD centred on (were)tigers and collective memory, forced reindeer culls as instrument of settler colonialism in the North, and listening to whales in the wake of imperialism. A shortened version of her chapter on whales can be found in the article “Whales, AI and the Right to Opacity: Decolonising Interspecies Communication in the Work of Ariel Guzik.” Tessel has an MA in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also completed her PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. She has taught in postcolonial theory, media studies and comparative literature both there and in the Netherlands. Her writing is published in Third Text, the edited volume Interspecies Performance, Metropolis M and Kunstlicht.
Tessel Janse
(she/her)
Art historian • postcolonial theorist • art critic • interspecies ecologies
Co-author of Listening with Whales Artistically
Steven Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. An open-water swimmer, poet, writer, and water-activist, he has written numerous scholarly books, including An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), Ocean (2020), and At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009). Books of poetry include Sailing without Ahab (2024), Swim Poems (2022), and Two Crossings (2025). He has edited or co-edited numerous collections of essays and published many scholarly and public humanities articles. Current projects include a book about ocean swimming as eco-meditation for the Anthropocene and the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to the Blue Humanities. He (still) blogs at The Bookfish and occasionally tweets @stevermentz.
Dr. Éadin O’Mahony is a marine mammal ecologist working at the intersections of science, culture, and care. Her research explores how we might listen differently to whales—through breath, behaviour, genomes, and relationships—by developing non-invasive methods such as drone-based blow sampling. Working across the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific, she collaborates closely with coastal and Indigenous communities to support more just and inclusive forms of ocean stewardship. Éadin is interested in whales as social, cultural, and communicative beings, and in how scientific listening can be reshaped through humility, reciprocity, and collaboration beyond academia.
Éadin N. O’Mahony
(She/her)
Ecologist • Conservation Biologist • Wildlife Geneticist
Co-author of Listening with Whales Scientifically
Marianna Ritchey is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She writes on an array of topics having to do with cultural production, education, and political change. Her first book, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (Chicago, 2019) examines some of the ways U.S. classical music culture operates via certain capitalist ideologies concerning individualism, competition, technological innovation, and a Weberian commitment to the notion that success equals virtue. She has also written and published several articles investigating music and political imagining, including a Current Musicology article suggesting that musicologists should reapproach the discredited value of musical autonomy from an explicitly anarchist perspective; a Music & Politics article performing a materialist critique of elite U.S. classical music institutions’ social justice initiatives; and an Open Access Musicology article introducing Marxism to music history undergraduates. Her second book, Academic Practice for the End of the World, will be published on Wesleyan University Press in spring, 2027. Ritchey’s theoretical ideas have evolved within and alongside her participation in abolitionist and mutual aid projects in her community of Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg wrote Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House which came out on ECM, and more recently Just Leave It All Behind and Lost Steps. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Umru, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. In 2024 he won a Grammy Award as part of For the Birds, in the category of Best Boxed Set. Whale Music and Secret Sounds of Ponds are his latest books. Nightingales In Berlin and Eastern Anthems are his latest films. His piece Eleven Paths to Animal Music premiered at the Sammlung Hoffmann in Berlin in 2025. Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Alex South
(he/him)
Musician • Ecomusicologist • Bioacoustician
Co-author of Listening with Whales
Based in Scotland, Alex South is a musician and researcher inspired by the sounds of the more-than-human world. He creates and performs live music for clarinets and electronics, often in multi-artform collaborations, and teaches at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and University of St Andrews. In his compositional work he aims to produce musical experiences that highlight the wonderful, varied, and startling sounds of other animals, and are underpinned by rigorous research into animal communication. Alex’s recent Postdoctoral Fellowship at IASH (University of Edinburgh) was focused on the role of musicians in interspecies grieving practices. His PhD dissertation, Cetacean Citations (2024), combined practice-led research from the perspectives of ecomusicology and zoömusicology with bioacoustical analysis of the rhythms of humpback whale song. Listen to the Cetacean Citations portfolio here.
Eric is a postdoc at the Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University. His current research is in using Distributed Acoustic Sensing – fiber-optic cables repurposed as acoustic listening devices– to detect and monitor whale populations. He did his PhD at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he studied deep-diving beaked whale behavior using acoustic localization with arrays of hydrophones. Eric has a long-held passion for sound, both musically and scientifically, and is always interested in finding ways to bridge those two aspects of acoustics.
Finn is an alum of the University of Nevada, Reno School of Music and holds both a Master’s degree and a PhD in Ethnomusicology from New York University, where they were a Henry M. MacCracken Fellow and a Dean’s Fellow. Their scholarship explores interrelationships between music, embodiment, and science; multispecies relations mediated through sound; and the ways in which music fosters intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resilience amid escalating global environmental challenges. They approach this work with a sustained commitment to gender-aware and decolonial perspectives, emphasizing ethical engagement, situated knowledge, and respect for diverse musical worlds. Their published research includes an article in Analytical Approaches to World Music on the intertwined histories of trees, violin-family instruments, and human bodies, examining how instrumental materiality shapes sensory engagement with music. They are also the author of “Listening-With Whales: Transcorporeal Sound, Queer Ecofeminism, and Musical Apprenticeship in the Anthropocene,” forthcoming in the edited volume Ecofeminism Otherwise: Situated Knowledges in a Time of Planetary Crisis. They have presented their work at conferences in the United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
Wer is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Nicolaus Copernicus University. Their dissertation argues for an affective turn in academic practice as an anti-fascist micropolitics, drawing on feminist new materialisms (Barad, Braidotti, Neimanis, Tsing), Deleuze-Guattarian schizoanalysis, and post-qualitative inquiry to move knowledge production beyond representationalism toward embodied, experimental, and ethico-onto-epistemological practice. Alongside the dissertation, they are developing project on situated interspecies microhistories of care, play, and cooperation. Born and raised by the Baltic Sea in Tricity, Poland, Wer has trained as a competitive swimmer for most of their life and currently serves as a swimming referee. This kinesthetic relation to water guides their research as a method.
