That's the theory of Eduardo Mercado, a neuroscientist at the University of Buffalo that he presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting last week.
“Simply knowing that thee are three whales swimming in the ocean is not very useful if you do not know where the whales are,” Mercado said. “Singers have to figure out where other whales are by listening.”
But this can be challenging as sounds get distorted as they propagate through water. Mercado speculates that whales sing in an attempt to recreate the vocalisations of their kin as they originally sounded.
“By imitating the sounds of other singers, a whale can create a copy of what the sounds he hears are like at the source,” he said. “The singer can then potentially compare incoming sounds to memories of undistorted copies of those sounds, and use the differences to judge the distance the sound has travelled.”
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Mercado thinks his hypothesis could be tested by playing novel songs to whales and seeing which parts they learn. He predicts that only certain song segments containing spatial information will get repeated.
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Cosmos Magazine
