![]() ![]() Inset: enlargement of a blue whale's B call, lasting about 15 seconds at a frequency of 16 Hz.Īudio recording of a blue whale's "song" (MP3 format requires Quicktime or Real Player) Whale songs consist of an A call, a series of pulses, followed by a long, low moan called the B call, both can be seen in the orange markings above. Spectrogram showing a visual representation of a blue whale song recorded by Professor Roger Bland. They found that the whales all produce the B call at the same pitch, at a frequency of 16.02 Hz, exactly four octaves below middle C. "Blue whales in a given population have been observed to align their pitch to a common value, but we have now been able to determine just how accurately they are able to do so," said Roger Bland, professor of physics at San Francisco State University.īland and colleagues analyzed recordings of 4,378 blue whale songs, off the California coast, and focused on the whales' B calls - the long, sad moan that typically forms the second half of the blue whale song that is specific to the eastern North Pacific population. The authors suggest that the uniform pitch used by blue whale populations could allow individual whales to locate potential mates by swimming toward them or away from them. ![]() Results were published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 2, 2010 - Blue whales are able to synchronize the pitch of their calls with an extremely high level of accuracy, and a very slim margin of error from call to call, according to a new study of the blue whale population in the eastern North Pacific. Blue whales align the pitch of their songs with extreme accuracy, study finds
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