The male Humpback Whale songs repeat in cycles from anywhere between nine and twenty seven minutes. Individual Whales have been documented as singing continuously for up to twenty three hours.
We base our cycle timing of the whale song on the crescendo to the high frequency pulses. Note the subtle but definite descent in frequency of each of the passages syncopated by low frequency staccato pulses. Viewed with a spectrogram the low frequency pulses can be seen to be very precise chords of frequencies. These are very clear and consistent characteristics of the Songline cycles we have recorded over the past twenty years.
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