Josephine Hubbard & Lisa Walker, Conversing with Whales

April 29 2023, 16:00 BST/ 11:00 EDT/ 08:00 PST

Humpbacks as a Model for Interstellar Communication

Humpback whales are majestic animals immersed in a watery world. Complexity is a pervasive component of these animals' lives, from their fluid social structures and long-distance migration patterns to their coordinated feeding behaviors and intricate vocal communication. This talk will discuss what characteristics humpbacks possess that make them a great model for understanding interspecies communication. We present both theoretical and empirical evidence outlining how curiosity, engagement, and conversational elements are naturally elicited by humpback whales, and how these traits may facilitate our conversing with whales. These theories are informed by our recent interactions and playback experiments with humpback whales, including a unique encounter in Alaska in 2021. Applying both scientific and music-based perspectives, we postulate how these characteristics may provide a unique opportunity to better understand and converse with worlds beyond our own.

Our speakers Josephine Hubbard and Lisa Walker are researchers in the SETI-Templeton Humpback Whale Research team, an interdisciplinary team of biologists, musicians, artists and physicists, who seek to understand the communicative complexity, intelligence and flexibility of humpback whales.

Josephine (“Josie”) Hubbard is a graduate student in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group at the University of California Davis. Her research explores the interaction between behavioral flexibility and cognition with an animals’ propensity to adjust to anthropogenic disturbance and engage in human-wildlife interactions. Josie is a primatologist by training, having studied primates both in the wild and captivity for the last decade spanning across four continents. However, her research interests span beyond the primate order and in more recent years she has begun to investigate these questions in other branches of the animal kingdom such as songbirds and cetaceans.

Lisa Walker is a whale song theorist. She takes her background in music and applies it to understanding the song of the humpback whale. Her studies are informed by traditional field research, artificial intelligence, information theory and immersive underwater observations of singing whales. Lisa believes humpback song and human music share a deep pattern logic and aims to design an interspecies language based on this logic to interact with these beings in a meaningful way. While melody has been her primary focus, her current studies include investigating the temporal patterns of rhythms as the primary building block of both human and humpback whale song.

The recording of this session is available below.