Listen.
In March 1949, that is what a group of scientists were doing during an expedition off Bermuda: listening.
While seeking to capture the impact of salinity and temperature on sound propagation in the ocean, the scientists took a few days away from their usual work to record underwater audio instead. They labelled the recordings on discs and filed them under broad categories: “Fish noises, Moaning, Whoop whoop.”
Seventy-five years later, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution rediscovered the discs, tucked in the archives.
They too listened. But this time, the scientists knew exactly what that “moaning” and “whoop whoop” was: the song of a humpback whale.
The whale song captured in 1949 is now the earliest known recording of a humpback whale. Recently made available to the public on WHOI’s website, the recording is not only important as an example of whale song in the 1940s, it helps explain the origins of the field of marine bioacoustics and makes a case for preserving records for future generations of scientists.
“It’s a testament to the importance of hard fought, hard won data that you may not really know what to do with, or is outside of your own field,” said Peter Tyack, PhD, emeritus research scholar at WHOI. “It helped launch a field and today, gives us a window on an ancient ocean soundscape.”
Ashley Jester, PhD, director of research data and library services at the WHOI, discovered the disc last year among a collection of uncommon recordings taken on a gray audograph, most frequently used as a dictation device at the time.
After digitizing a few discs — a project she then received a grant to complete — the sounds brought goosebumps to Ms. Jester’s skin.
“It was a very full body, visceral experience, and I was a little teary, and I was just like, that’s a whale, right?” said Ms. Jester. “I wasn’t expecting to have something that was so clear and obvious.”
Suspecting the importance of such an early, carefully preserved whale recording, Ms. Jester connected with Mr. Tyack, who had studied humpback whale songs for much of his career. Instantly, Mr. Tyack recognized it as a humpback whale.
“The timbre of the notes and the way they are sequenced is really unique to humpbacks,” he said.
Recording whale sounds was not the purpose of that cruise in March 1949, said Mr. Tyack. It was to take measurements of human sound’s intensity in the ocean, recorded as physical or written outputs.
“But they were so curious that they actually seemed to have taken some days where they didn’t do their usual scientific experiments, and instead just listened to see what they could hear,” Ms. Jester said.
The technology used to record the whale song was a feat of “creative engineering,” Mr. Tyack said.
An underwater microphone called a hydrophone was hooked up to a “suitcase” — a package of technology to amplify and transform the signals — and then to the audograph. The next person to use that technology was William Schevill, PhD, the founder of the field of marine bioacoustics.
In 1948, Mr. Schevill traveled to the Saguenay River in Canada, a habitat filled exclusively with beluga whales, according to Mr. Tyack.
Mr. Schevill and his wife, Barbara Lawrence, eventually published a paper on the sounds of beluga whales.
“Unknown to history, Schevill must have been so anxious to go back and get recordings, he ended up borrowing the equipment,” said Mr. Tyack.
In July 1949, Mr. Schevill took the equipment back to the Saguenay River where he could confidently identify the sounds as beluga whales. He then published a vinyl disc with the recordings, effectively launching the field of marine mammal bioacoustics.
“[This recording] has allowed me to put together all of the sort of the wonderful connections that can happen in an institution like WHOI,” said Mr. Tyack. “An engineer can play with a new idea and take it to sea, the other people on the cruise are curiosity-driven enough to break off from what they are supposed to be doing to record cool sounds they know nothing about, and then Schevill could use that to found my field.”
“It took Ashley discovering [the recording] 75 years later that allowed us to put all the pieces together,” he added.
Ms. Jester’s recent discovery adds to a data set that allows scientists to track long-term changes in ocean soundscapes, such as the increase in ocean noise due in part to the late 20th century’s rise in shipping. Climate change and CO2 absorption have also produced a warmer, more acidic ocean, which impacts how sound propagates.
“We really need to have the facts to be able to make the right judgments about how to protect marine life from changes in the ocean soundscape,” said Mr. Tyack. “Everybody else should look through their data closets to see, do we have better geographic coverage? Can we reach deeper in time?”
The whale recording is also a testament to the importance of private institutions curating and maintaining a robust data archive, “especially as we see the loss of some government databases,” said Mr. Tyack.
“We hope people should be thinking of the future now,” he said. “Let’s all make sure that our institutions develop mechanisms to be able to preserve data and curate it in forums that will be useful for future generations who will be able to answer questions we haven’t even thought of yet.”
Ms. Jester agreed. Archives and data preservation are investments, she said. “What field is emerging right now, whose hidden history will then be preserved and discovered 100 years from now in our archive? I don’t know, but that’s why we’re building it and why we’re keeping it.”
Now that the audograph recordings are digitized, Ms. Jester expects to move onto tackling data formats that are at higher risk for decay: listening and preserving without quite knowing what it could mean, just like those scientists in 1949.
“They didn’t know what they were listening to, but they knew it was important, and they knew it was important to make a record,” said Ms. Jester. “That was a commitment on those scientists’ part to the future of science.”
This article appears in February 20, 2026.