Join Sound Files as we dive into a remarkable project to preserve the oldest known audio recordings of humpback whale songs, made in 1949 using unexpected technology, rediscovered at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. You'll hear how archivist Ashley Jester stumbled upon these forgotten audio discs while leading tours, and how digitization expert Paul Adams determined that the "fish noises" were actually whale songs. These seven-decade-old recordings show us how listening matters for understanding ocean life in the past and today.
In this episode, listen back with Sound Files to the oldest known whale recordings from 1949! Host Jesse Johnston tells the story with archival audio and interviews with archivist Ashley Jester and audio preservation engineer Paul Adams.
This episode features archival recordings from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), including the historic 1949 Gray Audograph disc collection. Additional humpback whale sounds courtesy of Ocean Alliance; dolphin sounds provided by Dr. Laela Sayigh and the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program.
Host and Creator: Jesse Johnston (University of Michigan School of Information)
Producer/Editor: Teresa Carey
Writer: Jacob Pinter
Sound Engineering: Steve Lack
Original Music: Evan Haywood
Produced by Morse Alpha Studios with support from the National Recording Preservation Foundation and the University of Michigan School of Information.
Learn more about sound preservation at https://www.recordingpreservation.org.
[Sounds of doors opening, footsteps echoing in a large room]
Ashley Jester
And these actually lead into our archival vaults. And so I’m gonna open the one where we keep a lot of paper, photographs, negatives, and other memorabilia, just to give a sense.
Jesse Johnston (Host)
In a basement of a lab building on the coast of Massachusetts … Ashley Jester walks through the stacks of an extensive science library.
Ashley is the Director of Research Data and Library Services at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
For almost a hundred years … scientists at this institution have been studying the ocean … and documenting it in all kinds of ways.
The library holds basically every multimedia format that exists.
Ashley Jester
And so the overall space is climate controlled. But these vaults I would say are “extra special climate controlled” because they are colder than the overall main space, and most importantly they have controlled humidity.
Jesse Johnston
Ashley started her job in Woods Hole about a year ago at the beginning of 2025.
And as she settled in … she started learning about what was in those archival vaults.
Ashley Jester
So we do tours periodically and one of the things we like to do for our tour groups is pull out scientific equipment and show them how the scientists have gathered data all over the years. And because I'm new and I was new, I was still very new then. I had never heard of this. I was like, wait, what is this? (DONE)
Jesse Johnston
During these tours, Ashley kept hearing about some really old sound recordings.
With every detail she learned … she wanted to know more.
Ashley Jester
And so my staff is really educating me as they're educating the tour group. And I'm learning about, well, this was an office dictation machine. And they used it to make early underwater recordings. And and here, boss, here's the disc collection. And so I was like, this is really cool.
Jesse Johnston
But there was a catch.
Ashley couldn’t hear what was on those discs.
From handwritten notes, she could piece some details together.
The recordings were made in 1949 and 1950.
She had information about scientists who were involved … and how they basically invented a way to record sounds underwater.
And there were a few tantalizing clues about what was in the recordings: some of them contained “fish noises” … according to the notes.
Ashley Jester: Probably about a week later, our digitization expert was actually down to visit. And again, because I was new, he was going through the vaults with me. We were talking about different audio formats that we have.
Paul Adams:
She said what's interesting is she said the notes say “fish noises”. You know, unknown marine sounds.
This is Paul Adams – the digitization expert.
Paul Adams
And I was like, oh, that's very interesting. But then she told me that the date was 1949. And then my mouth just kind of dropped open. And I'm like, Ashley, said, do you realize what this could be?
Paul runs a business that specializes in digitizing old, archival audio.
He’s also based in Massachusetts.
Paul knew that in the early days of underwater recordings … scientists were still figuring out that some “fish noises” turned out to come from whales.
On Ashley’s recordings … there was no telling what those “fish noises” actually were … at least not until Paul and his partner John pressed “play”.
Paul Adams
When we put that, you know, on and played it, John and I were both saying, you know, who knows, maybe nobody has played these records back because they were in mint condition. We might be the first people in 77 years, you know, to hear this recording and to know what it was.
Jesse Johnston
I’m Jesse Johnston, and you’re listening to Sound Files… a podcast about the preservation of recorded sounds supported by the National Recording Preservation Foundation. We’re hoping the podcast offers our listeners a chance to hear some of the amazing stories preserved in audio, as well as meet some of the folks involved in helping to give us new ways to preserve and access these sounds!
In this episode … those so-called “fish sounds” from more than 75 years ago … turned out to be recordings of whale songs.
They’re the oldest known recordings of humpback whales.
These recordings showed the value of listening to the ocean.
We’ll hear why these recordings apparently surprised scientists in the 1940s.
And now … they’re giving scientists today a unique window into the ocean of the past.
[Sound of humpback whales from Ocean Alliance]
**Jesse Johnston
Some of the most powerful advocates for protecting the ocean … are the voices you’re hearing right now.
These are humpback whales … recorded in 1979 and provided by Ocean Alliance.
In the late 1960s … using underwater recordings … scientists discovered that humpback whales sing songs.
And then … the rest of the world heard those songs.
National Geographic magazine published 10 million copies of the record Songs of the Humpback Whale making it the largest single pressing in recording history.
Whale songs flew across the solar system on the Voyager golden record.
And these songs sparked real change.
In the early ‘70s … Congress passed the Endangered Species Act … and the Marine Mammal Protection Act … which helped protect whales and many other species.
In 1949 … almost two decades before the discovery that humpback whales can sing … researchers were asking some basic questions about how sound behaves in the ocean.
It all started in the small town of Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Ashley Jester
So when you're down in the village, it really feels like you've maybe visited, you know, a nice little New England kind of seaside town and you just kind of, if you notice inside the doors, it's not little shops selling trinkets, it's laboratories and people walking around with work boots and, y’know coats and doing their scientific work. (DONE)
Since it was founded in 1930 … the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has explored the ocean and developed new tools to go deeper.
Insiders call it “WHOI” for short.
Today WHOI has a fleet of research ships … submersibles … and robotic explorers … all dedicated to understanding the ocean.
And Ashley says … you can feel it in the air when you walk around campus.
Ashley Jester
And so we have the ship's mechanics and the carpenters and the electricians. And so at any given time, especially in the summer when you're walking out, because they're out in the, working in the driveways and stuff, you hear the errrrr, the metal being grinded, or you hear saws going, because they're building stuff and hacking away. It's, yeah, it's, you're, it's–as soon as you're there, you're like, yep, I'm in the middle of lab work happening. (DONE)
In the recordings made in the late 1940s … which Ashley pulled out of the archives … the field of oceanography was going through a big change.
During World War II, the US Navy began to work more closely with oceanographers.
They had a lot of questions about the ocean environment.
By 1949 … a few years after the war ended… scientists and the military had a common goal.
They wanted to understand how sound behaved in the ocean.
Ashley Jester
We had just figured out how well and how far sound traveled underwater and we were starting, and I say we, the scientists, were starting to experiment with, well, how do changes in temperature affect how sound propagates? How do changes in salinity affect how sound propagates? And so this research cruise was really aimed very much at like basic scientific research, at understanding the physical properties of sound travel underwater.
In early 1949, researchers set out on a research vessel called Atlantis.
They sailed to Bermuda.
And they started a research program … that had nothing to do with whales.
Ashley Jester
They would drop munitions like bombs in and listen to when it would explode. They would drop hollow spheres and wait to hear it implode. They would turn off the sound on the ship that they were on, stop all of the motors, and then try to listen to hear other ships moving in the area.
Ashley Jester
So they were expecting to hear the explosions, they were expecting to hear the implosions, they were expecting to hear the motor runnings of the submarines and the other boats that were part of the fleet.
Jesse Johnston
According to Ashley … the scientists didn’t plan to make sound recordings. Not at first.
They had a device called a pen recorder – which is similar to a seismometer that measures earthquakes.
They planned to turn sounds from the ocean … into lines on a piece of paper.
But at some point … the scientists had a different idea.
Ashley says there are many mysteries surrounding these audio recordings.
Including … how they came to be in the first place.
Ashley Jester
But obviously somebody, and I'm just in my head of imagining it, some creative WHOI engineer was like, well, you know, we have this dictaphone. Why don't we see if we can write to that? You know, it really feels like they were just kind of messing around with what was possible and stumbled upon an ability to record underwater.
Jesse Johnston
As Atlantis sailed, the scientists towed a hydrophone – which is a microphone that can record underwater.
To make the recordings, they relied on a device called an audo-graph.
That’s “audo” spelled with a D. Audograph.
And according to Paul Adams … the archival audio expert … the scientists were stretching the audograph beyond what it was designed to do.
Paul Adams
The audograph was a 1940s technology based primarily for dictation purposes. Like, you know, a boss would dictate a letter for his secretary onto this blue flexible plastic record and then just slip it into the record and leave it on her desk and say, type out a letter for me. That's all it was intended to be used for.
Jesse Johnston
The audograph that WHOI used was made by a company called Gray.
The Gray Audograph is a small tabletop device.
It has a little bit of an art deco vibe.
And it’s very simple looking … with only a couple of buttons and a couple of knobs.
Paul Adams
The machine looks like it looks like an old radio or maybe even like somebody saw it like on a table in a yard sale or something not knowing what it was, they might think it was like a toaster or something.
The audograph recorded onto blue discs that look like small vinyl records.
The discs are flexible – so flexible that if you try to balance one on your finger, the edges of the disc flap in the air.
How exactly the researchers adapted the Gray Audograph for their recordings … is another mystery.
They connected the audograph to a device called “the suitcase” … which was more or less like a preamp connecting the audograph to the hydrophone.
According to Paul, the Gray Audograph was modified in a way that shouldn’t have worked.
The built-in microphone had been removed.
Normally, the audograph didn’t work at all without the microphone.
The fact that WHOI pulled this off … might be a sign that the WHOI engineers worked directly with the audograph’s manufacturers.
Ashley Jester
That was one of the major innovations that WHOI brought, was bringing together all of the electrical engineering, audio engineering equipment that would be needed to take that signal from the hydrophone and write it to other instruments. And we know then that whatever came out of the suitcase was written to the audograph. And so that's how these were recorded.
Jesse Johnston
In all, the WHOI researchers recorded more than 200 audograph discs.
Since each disc has two sides … and each side could hold about a half-hour of audio … the collection has something like 200 hours of sound.
Once Ashley learned about the recordings … she dove into the archive.
But she didn’t have a way to listen to them.
Other archivists knew about the recordings too.
But she thinks the format is one reason they flew under the radar.
Ashley Jester
We do actually have some of the audograph machines in our archives, but being good archivists, we're not gonna play archival discs on old archival machines that may damage them. Who knows what will happen? And so I think part of it was just that there wasn't really an easy way to access the material. And so they sat kind of inconspicuously on the shelf.
Jesse Johnston
The audograph records also came with notes.
Each record was stored in a sleeve.
And there were handwritten descriptions … almost like liner notes from a CD.
Ashley says that by reading these notes, you can see the scientists’ thinking evolve in real time.
At first, they describe the explosions they made in the water. Maybe they note some other sounds in the margin.
As the cruise goes on, those “extra” sounds take up more space in the notes.
Eventually, the scientists paused their original experiments … and just dropped the hydrophone in to listen.
Ashley Jester
But I will say throughout the collection there are incidental notes of these fish noises or moaning or other, mewing is another way that sometimes they're described. It really, lot of, and you can sort of see the variation scientist by scientist, but it really feels like onomatopoeia style descriptions, right? They're really trying to like write in words how it is sounding to them.
Jesse Johnston
Ashley is using these notes to piece together details from the cruise.
But she says there are many mysteries to solve.
She knows who was on the cruise – but she doesn’t know for sure who made the recordings.
She also wants more details about how exactly the recordin g setup worked.
Ashley Jester
There's almost this like audograph shaped hole, you know, everywhere I will get down to and I'll be like, wait a second, like they're talking about everything around the audograph for this cruise, but not the disc itself and so, or the machine itself or how it was used. // As much as I am obsessed with that material and format, it feels to me like for them, it was just, no, that's just the way we recording. It wasn't something important enough for them to make note of. I'm like, “Why? You were so good about documenting everything else. Why couldn't you document this better?
Jesse Johnston
By this point … it was time for Ashley to find a way to finally listen to these discs.
She needed to call in a professional.
Ashley: And it sat in my brain and kind of just danced around. Then I saw, and part of it was, gosh, I would really like to get those digitized, but where am I going to get the money? // When I saw the call for grant applications for NRPF, it felt like heaven opening up and coming down. It's like, here's my opportunity.
Ashley turned to the NRPF – the National Recording Preservation Foundation.
She applied for a grant to digitize the discs.
The hard part … was that Ashley didn’t know for sure what was in the recordings.
She thought there could be whale songs.
But without a way to listen … she couldn’t be sure.
Ashley Jester
I wrote the grant exactly, you know, saying, I think that there may be really interesting data on these disks. I think there may be whale song, but we don't know. I'm basing that on the notes that are on the sleeves. But we do know that these are recordings from underwater from 1949 and 1950. And so, you know, even if there's no whale song, just having that background oceanscape sound will be valuable to the scientific community.
Jesse Johnston
While she waited for news about the grant … Ashley decided to get a taste of what was on the recordings.
She went back to Paul Adams – the digitization expert from earlier.
Ashley hired his company, Mass Productions, to digitize a few discs that had the most promise.
Out of about 200 discs in the collection … she chose three.
Paul Adams
We were excited because we get to transfer all of them and see what was on there. It's kind of like unlocking a mystery.
Paul says the discs themselves don’t need much restoration. After a quick cleaning with soap and water, they’re ready to go.
But playing back an audograph has some unique limitations.
Like CDs, the rotation speed changes as the disc plays.
Even though audograph discs look similar to standard records … you can basically only play them back on audograph machines.
Paul Adams
The revolutions per minute starts around 33 and a third, but by the time it gets to the outside edge of the record it's down to about 15 revolutions per minute and it's all controlled by a mechanical worm gear so it's pretty much impossible to play it back correctly on a standard turntable. // So you would have to like kind of like by ear pitch adjust and speed adjust the record every couple of minutes and it just never comes out right.
Jesse Johnston
Now, this was not Paul’s first time working with audographs.
He had devised an audograph rig with modifications that played back the discs … and also cut down on noise and hum.
Once Paul and his partner put on Ashley’s disc … it didn’t take long to realize what they were hearing.
Paul Adams
And we hear, you know, sounds of like, you know, water rushing by the hydrophone and other noises. And then all of a sudden you start to hear the, you know, very particular sound of a humpback whale–because I've heard a lot of them, so I know what it sounds like. And so we heard that coming through the speakers and we all just started kind of like jumping for joy.
[Excerpt of an audio recording of whalesong from WHOI archives]
Jesse Johnston
According to scientists at WHOI … this is definitely a humpback whale.
And it may be the earliest preserved recording of humpback whale songs.
The date was March 7, 1949.
Ashley Jester
I'm not an oceanographer either, but it's amazing to hear that whale song. Just–this is gonna sound a little froufy, but it's like, you feel very connected to nature and to like the bigger universe when you are listening to something like that. I still feel the goosebumps that I felt that first time that I heard it.
Jesse Johnston
Once Ashley had this recording … she needed a scientist’s perspective on what she was hearing.
One of the experts she turned to was Laela Sayigh … a biologist at WHOI.
Laela Sayigh
And she asked a few of us to just listen to it and kind of verify the species. //
I mean, it was really unmistakable as a humpback whale. Just knowing that the technology wasn't very advanced back then. So so the fact that they were able to get such a high quality recording and that it was so well preserved was really astonishing.
Jesse Johnston
Laela has more than 40 years’ experience studying marine mammals–mainly dolphins.
She says that to truly understand these animals … we have to listen.
Visibility underwater is not good.
But sound travels well in water … even better than it does in air.
And dolphins also use echolocation to find their way around.
Laela Sayigh
So they are really wired for sound, these animals, they're really auditory creatures. so, you know, so from that perspective, if we want to learn about their lives, really, the only way we can do that is by recording them.
Jesse Johnston
Since the 1980s, Laela has been working with the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program in Florida.
Over the years, they’ve recorded more than 300 individual dolphins.
Laela has also seen recording technology change drastically.
She actually has her own collection of analog recordings that need to be digitized.
She remembers recording dolphin sounds on cassette tapes … and even VHS tapes, which could capture higher frequencies.
Laela Sayigh
Things have really changed fast, you know, whereas I remember the very first digital recording recorder that I bought in 2005 cost like $5,000, which was not an insubstantial amount of money for me at all back then. I mean, it still isn't, honestly. But it was a game changer. I mean, it was amazing. It could record four channels sampled at 96 kilohertz, which is the minimum that we would want to use for dolphins.
Jesse Johnston
These days … Laela and her team have several ways to record dolphins.
The researchers catch dolphins and spend about an hour handling them.
During these health assessments … they attach a hydrophone straight onto the dolphin’s forehead with a suction cup.
That helps the scientists get really high quality recordings … and they know which dolphin is making which sounds.
Laela Sayigh
And at the end of the time after we've recorded them we usually put a digital acoustic tag on their back which is attached with suction cups so it's non-invasive as well. And these are like little mini computers that record all of their sound and their movements, like their pitch, roll, and heading and their depth. ... So we release them with those tags and then try to follow and observe them for as long as they're willing to wear them. Some animals are more willing than others.
Jesse Johnston
With these recordings … Laela and her research partners have learned a lot about what those dolphin sounds mean.
[Audio recording of dolphin songs]
They’ve identified noises called “signature whistles” … the dolphin equivalent of calling someone’s name.
[Audio recording of dolphin songs]
They’ve even discovered that mother dolphins “baby talk” to their kids.
The scientists call this “mother-ese”.
[Audio recording of dolphin songs]
Just like human baby talk … the dolphins use a higher pitch and are a little more sing-songy.
Laela Sayigh
The fact that they have these name like sounds and the motherese, these things that we can we can relate to. And I guess in both cases, humpbacks and dolphins, they learn their sounds, which is something that is also very relatable for us because, you know, we obviously learn and that's how we acquire language.
Jesse Johnston
Listening to whales has helped us realize all the things we have in common with these animals.
And Laela says there’s one other fact about humpback whales in particular that makes them attractive.
Dolphin noises are high-pitched, and sometimes scientists slow them down.
Blue whales sing songs … but we have to speed them up, because they’re too deep for humans to hear.
But not humpbacks. They sing their songs at a frequency humans can hear.
Laela Sayigh
I mean, it's kind of amazing to think these totally alien sort of creatures living in a totally different environment from us can make these sounds that are, you know, very, you know, just like, for example, their structure is something that we can identify and sort of relate to. It's kind of amazing.
Jesse Johnston
In 1949 … even though they wrote down that they were hearing “fish noises” … WHOI researchers were learning how to listen to humpback whales.
Today, WHOI scientists want to see what they can learn from these archival recordings.
Ashley Jester
We can't go back in time and make recordings from 1949 again. That's impossible. But when we can find something like this, it's as if we did that. Because here's this data that we didn't know that we had, and now we can bring it in and add it to the analysis.
Jesse Johnston
Ashley is a data scientist.
She’s excited just to have more data, because the audograph recordings fill a gap in the scientific record.
According to other scientists she’s worked with, who specialize in ocean acoustics … these recordings could help us understand how the ocean environment has changed over time.
In some ways the ocean has gotten louder over the decades … and in some ways it’s gotten quieter.
Whatever we learn from these recordings … it will be thanks to a group of experts who may not have known exactly what they were hearing … but they knew it needed to be preserved.
Ashley Jester
This is another gift from those early founders of the field, right? Like they already gave us so much scientifically in terms of like developing the equipment and doing the initial research and building up like the basic research. Part of the early field was just figuring out, what species is making which sound, right? It's like, you've already contributed so much and yet here they are, you still making new contributions.
Jesse Johnston
There’s also one key mystery that Ashley hopes to solve.
At the beginning of the whale song recording … we hear a man’s voice:
[audio recording of a voice in the distance]
Ashley doesn’t know who that is. And she really wants to find out.
Ashley Jester
Maybe on one of the other recordings, the person identifies themselves and so will be able to match the voice, or that maybe somebody will hear their voice and recognize it. You know, this is 1949. I think that there's probably people who are still alive who probably knew that voice in life and might recognize it.
Jesse Johnston
At the time this story comes out … it will take a little longer before the full collection is digitized.
Paul Adams, the technical expert, says this story could inspire libraries, universities, and other groups.
They acquire all kinds of materials, and they don’t always have the bandwidth to dig through old analog media.
Paul Adams
Using these sound recordings as an example of what's out there in archives might help to encourage other institutions and archivists to really start to think about what they have in their collection and how important it is to preserve it and what might be in their collection that they don't know.
Jesse Johnston
When people do look through those collections … they may find materials that show us the world in a whole new way.
… And that show people from the past puzzling through some of the same questions we ask today.
Ashley Jester
For me, the through thread of this story is curiosity. The physical oceanographers who were out on that cruise who didn't have to record this but did because they were curious and who kept the recorder going when they heard sounds that they didn't expect and couldn't explain but knew were important.
Jesse Johnston
The Sound Files podcast is presented by the National Recording Preservation Foundation, an independent nonprofit established by the Library of Congress, with generous support from the University of Michigan School of Information. Learn more, or make a donation, at recordingpreservation dot org
The senior producer and editor is Teresa Carey, with writer Jacob Pinter, and sound engineer Steve Lack. With original music by Evan Haywood.
Additional recordings for this episode were provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Ocean Alliance and the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program.
I'm Jesse Johnston, creator of sound files and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Remember: every sound tells a story, so let’s keep preserving them.