It is perhaps difficult to accept that … there could have been only one of this kind in this large oceanic expanse. We do not know the species of this whale, whether it was a hybrid or an anomalous whale that we have been tracking. Much remained unknown, the report confessed, and difficult to explain: … These tracks consistently appeared to be unrelated to the presence or movement of other whale species (blue, fin and humpback) monitored year-round with the same hydrophones.
#52 HERTZ WHALE SERIES#
Only one series of these 52-Hz calls has been recorded at a time, with no call overlap, suggesting that a single whale produced the calls. No other calls with similar characteristics have been identified in the acoustic data from any hydrophone system in the North Pacific basin. A scientific report, published 12 years later, would describe his case like this: The acoustic technicians would come to call him 52 Blue. So this whale was calling out high, and he was calling out to no one-or at least, no one seemed to be answering. His path wasn’t unusual, only his song-and the fact that they never detected any other whales around him. They kept tracking him for years, every migration season, as he made his way south from Alaska to Mexico. The whale that Joe George and Velma Ronquille heard was an anomaly: His sound patterns were recognizable as those of a blue whale, but his frequency was unheard of. Their calls can travel thousands of miles through the ocean.
They click and grunt and trill and hum and moan. Blue males sing louder than females, and the volume of their singing-at more than 180 decibels-makes them the loudest animals in the world. Whales make calls for a number of reasons-to navigate, to find food, to communicate with each other-and for certain whales, like humpbacks and blues, songs also seem to play a role in sexual selection. A recording of 52 Blue, sped up for audibility. But here it was, right in front of them, the audio signature of a creature moving through Pacific waters with a singularly high-pitched song. Blue whales usually came in somewhere between 15 and 20-on the periphery of what the human ear can hear, an almost imperceptible rumble. For a blue whale, which is what this one seemed to be, a frequency of 52 hertz was basically off the charts. Second Petty Officer Ronquille told him, “I think this is a whale.” Petty officer second class Velma Ronquille stretched it out on a different spectrogram so she could see it better. The acoustic technicians thought they knew what it was, but then they realized they didn’t. On December 7, the it was a strange sound. These hydrophones had been used to monitor Soviet subs until the Cold War ended after their declassification, the Navy started listening for other noises-other kinds of it-instead. These hydrophones had turned the formless it of the ocean and its noises into something measurable: pages of printed graphs rolling out of a spectrograph machine. William Ault became a runway that sends other men into the sky.īut at that Naval Air Station, on that day in December, the infinite Pacific appeared as something finite: audio data gathered by a network of hydrophones spread along the ocean floor. This is how it goes: The ocean swallows human bodies whole and makes them immortal. So did the Pacific, its waters vast and fathomless beyond an airfield named for an airman whose body was never found: William Ault, who died in the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Whidbey Island Naval Air Station remained. The other wars were over: Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf. 52 Hertz Whale are up tonight at 8.30pm.December 7, 1992: Whidbey Island, Puget Sound. Together with Bulp, they represent our music scene at this year’s online edition of the Eurosonic Noorderslag festival. So far, they have released two EPs and in front of them is another great opportunity to get recognised in the musical Europe. Derek Roberts of Drowned in Sound described their concert at the Sharpe Festival as the most intense, vibrant performance he’d seen over the weekend, and added: “There is a euphoric, post-rock side to them and they are super melodic, yet they also have this captivating power, and when their madness is unleashed, it’s really spectacular.” After their performance in Liverpool in 2019, the Getintothis portal chose their song “Fish In The Dead Sea” as the single of the week. The band 52 Hertz Whale gained popularity mainly thanks to their energetic performances in clubs and festivals throughout Europe, such as Liverpool Sound City, Ment, Colours of Ostrava, Žižkovská noc, and Pohoda.
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