Photo by yaruman5 on flickr
Biologist Roger Payne discovered that humpback whale’s sing in the mid-1960s. But his passion was more than scientific. At the time, whales were being hunted to extinction. As he put it, “Do you make catfood out of composer-poets? I think that’s a crime.” So he embarked on a campaign to imbed the songs in human music, with surprising and profound results. This piece originally aired on Studio 360 and then was reworked for All Things Considered (listen to that version here).
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