Re: [microsound] [lowercase-sound] somewhat OT but not entirely (fwd)

[the finger <pedro.monkeyfinger@xxxxxxxx>]

> I'll forward this. Sue me.



yeah, this is pretty... scary!



i read that before engines got in the water that whales could 
communicate with each other all over the world.  then it got noisey 
and comm was reduced to around

k, ya know what?  i read this in carl sagan s 'cosmos'

i ve gone and dug up the part i m referring to, and it reads this:

"For tens of millions of years these enormous, intelligent, 
communicative creatures evolved with essentially no natural enemies. 
Then the development of the steamship in the nineteenth century 
introduced an oninous source of noise pollution.  As commercial and 
military vessels became more abundant, the noise background in the 
oceans, especially at a frequency of twenty Hertz, became noticeable. 
Whales communicating across the oceans must have experienced 
increasingly greater difficulties.  The distance over which they 
could communicate must have decreased steadily.  Two hundred years 
ago, a typical distance across which finbacks could communicate was 
perhaps 10,000kms.  Today, the corresponding number is perhaps a few 
hundred km.  Do whales know each other's names?  Can they recognize 
each other as individuals by sounds alone?  We have cut the whales 
off from themselves.  Creatures that communicated for tens of 
millions of years have now effectively been silenced."


there s also a side note on the previous page with pictures of 
humpback whale songs recorded on a machine spectrograph:

"These hydrophonic recordings were made under water by F. Watlington 
at the Palisades Sofar Station, Bermuda, on April 28, 1964.  Roger 
Payne comments: 'The songs we taped in 1964 and 1969 are as different 
as Beethoven [is] from the Beatles.'  He found the (whale) music of 
the 1960's more beautiful than that for the 1970's."




--

  /|
  |\
  |/|
  / |
 | /
 |/