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Richard Fron

“… therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say?”

Today, science tells us that the “pyramidal silence” that Melville assigns to whales conceals their extraordinary ability to communicate. Researchers discovered that this is demonstrated in sperm whales by the variations they make on a sequence of clicking sounds (called ‘codas’.) What no one knows is what the clicking noises that we hear through the electronic microphones and loudspeakers sound like to the whale! They can hear up to a twelve octave range, compared with a human’s ten (at best). The clicks
can be as short as 1/1000 of a second, and as loud as 230 decibels. This, added to the knowledge that their brain is six times heavier than ours, and that their brain structure contains the same kind of ‘spindle neurons’ that are associated with emotions such as empathy, should make us wonder: What do their sounds and songs mean to them?

“Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!”

These sarcastic sentences that follow can make us (the world) wonder what may be behind the clicks that are supposedly what the whale says in order to make a living. If I can truly become an “excellent listener”, perhaps I can know the “profound being” singing the song. I imagine that Moby, in constant dialogue with The Voice of the Ocean, is telling Ahab and all the whale hunters exactly this …. CALL ME MOBY!