Before podcasts, there were pod tunes ~ long, intricate songs flowing from underwater behemoth to underwater behemoth.  These dynamic vocalizations carried stories of other pods in other oceans.  Together, the humpback whales would learn these new songs, sometimes hours long, and share them with those they met.  Even with dwindling populations, they continue this practice to the present day.

A humpback whale’s ability to memorize music is unsurpassed, and yet each rendition is different: a nuance here, an inflection there.  It’s easy to project our emotions upon the whales, hearing plaintive cries in the drawn-out lower registers and joy in the higher tones.  Yet their true depth of meaning lies beyond us.  Whalesong provides a window into something ultimately unfathomable: the life of the earth’s largest creatures, connected by ancestry and geographic expanse.

Humans have been fascinated by whales for years, although the earliest fascinations had more to do with…