The Oldest Known Whale Recording

Some discs simply wait their turn. This one waited seventy-seven years, tucked inside a paper sleeve scribbled with cryptic notes: "fish noises," "echoing fish." When Ashley Jester, the new Director of Research Data and Library Services at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), toured the archives in 2025, she stumbled upon these hand-labeled plastic discs. One year later, on February 10, 2026, the American institution announced that one of them holds the oldest known sound recording of a whale.

A sea trip on March 7, 1949

The scene takes place off the coast of Bermuda, aboard R/V Atlantis, the first ship ever built specifically for interdisciplinary marine research. The crew, made up of WHOI scientists working alongside the U.S. Office of Naval Research, is testing sonar systems, measuring underwater explosions, and studying how sound travels through the ocean depending on depth, salinity, and temperature. After World War II, the U.S. Navy has figured out that sonar is strategically vital, but the physics of underwater sound remains largely uncharted.

Between two experiments, the researchers take a few days to record "something else": biological sounds they capture without being able to name them. They file the recordings under vague headings. On the disc, a man's voice announces: "Side one of record twelve. The date, 7 March, 1949." Then comes a deep, modulated sound, instantly recognizable to a modern ear.

A Gray Audograph and an experimental "suitcase"

The recording relies on two unusual pieces of equipment. On the capture side, a hydrophone connected to a transducer, all housed in an onboard setup nicknamed the "WHOI suitcase," an early experimental underwater acoustic recording system. On the storage side, a Gray Audograph: an office dictation machine that etched the signal onto thin plastic discs in a spiral running from the center outward. Nothing to do with magnetic tape, which was already the dominant format at the time.

Paradoxically, that choice is what saved the recording. Magnetic tapes from the late 1940s often demagnetized or fell apart; the audograph discs, by contrast, endured. WHOI holds roughly 200 of these discs and has just received a 10,000 dollar grant from the National Recording Preservation Foundation to digitize the entire collection, close to 200 hours of audio.

A humpback whale, beyond any doubt

When Ashley Jester played the disc for Laela Sayigh, a WHOI marine bioacoustician, the verdict came quickly: a humpback whale, one of the few species known for producing long, complex, repeated sequences. Peter Tyack, an emeritus research scholar at the same institution, confirmed it immediately. In 1949, the scientists onboard had no way to make that connection: the link between those modulated wails and large cetaceans would not become public knowledge until the late 1960s, through Roger Payne's work on whale song.

A nice historical twist: that same year, 1949, WHOI scientist William Schevill and his wife Barbara Lawrence, a pioneering mammalogist, recorded belugas in the Saguenay River in Quebec using a crude hydrophone and a dictation machine. That recording became the first acoustic identification of a marine mammal in the wild, and the birth certificate of marine mammal bioacoustics. Both threads run through the same place: WHOI.

A witness to a quieter ocean

Beyond its archival appeal, the disc carries rare scientific value. It documents an ocean soundscape from before global shipping networks, before the explosion of container traffic, before large-scale seismic surveys. WHOI researchers note that the background noise on the recording is remarkably low, making it a valuable point of comparison with today's audio. The ocean is now much louder, both in the number and the variety of sound sources, and that shift changes how whales communicate, navigate, and survive.

Being able to reach back to 1949 to measure changes in ambient noise and in humpback whale songs opens real prospects for marine acoustic ecology. We now have an extraordinarily rare baseline, rescued almost by accident thanks to a poorly labeled envelope. For the sound enthusiast I am, it is also a slightly dizzying reminder: the sounds we record today without quite knowing what to do with them may well be, eighty years from now, the only audible memory of a world that no longer exists. I touched on this question of sonic memory in an earlier blog post, and this discovery gives it fresh resonance.

If you had the chance today to record a single sound for a listener in 2106, which one would you choose?