JIM NOLLMAN
 

Jim Nollman has been involved in animal communication research for 30 years, and is known around the world for playing improvised music with many different species of whales. He directs Interspecies Inc., a non-profit that brings artists and activists from around the world into the last wild places to help transform human perceptions about habitat and animals. In the past year, Interspecies has produced a project on the Russian White Sea, co-sponsored by the European Union, to introduce a unique preservation scheme for these last belugas in Europe, and to The Azores to study the potential click language of sperm whales. He is the author of several books of nature writing including The Charged Border: Where Whales and Humans Meet (Holt) and, just released, The Beluga Café (Sierra Club). His CD Orcas Greatest Hits documents wild orcas responding interactively with human musicians. Jim Nollman lives on an island in Puget Sound.

ABSTRACT

SHAMANIC BIOLOGY. IF WHALES HAVE SONGS, CAN THEY HEAR OUR SONGS?... If humpback whales have songs, do they rely on a sense of aesthetics to compose? And if frequency modulation is just a fancy term for melody, does a baby orca's acquisition of its own family's frequency-modulated dialect necessitate a kind of musical education? If individual sperm whale signatures are composed of unique click patterns, are we listening to a family signature when pod members touch foreheads and click all together, sometimes for hours at a time? Is it just an accident of evolution that the individual and group signatures are similar enough to West African drum language; that a West African drum master has, so far, been the only human being able to identify individual sperm whales by listening to their rhythms. And in the Russian Arctic, a famous petroglyph, reputed to be the world's oldest extant whale image, clearly shows a woman and a beluga whale vocally communicating with one another. Did people just think they would talk to whale 6000 years ago? Or did they know something we've forgotten? At the University of Helsinki, and at the Sorbonne, courses in zoo musicology and animal aesthetics attempt to study such questions of animal creativity and interspecies communication by adopting a more seamless merger of shamanism and behavioral biology. Are whales creative? If toothed whales play, might they not also play with their calls? And if a musician plays a melody into the water near an orca, is it possible to discern when the whale is merely vocalizing with other orcas, and when it is interacting with the musician? If there is a discernible difference, why then, in Puget Sound, do some biologists demand that any intentional interaction with orcas be construed as harassment, even if the whales, themselves, venture close to engage the musician. Is this judgement reached out of respect for the whales. Or is it reached out of disrespect? Ironically, the boat engines that most biologists rely on, are far louder than any underwater speaker. Intention is the key word here. Is it possible that intention, and not observation, may guide our future with all these large brained cetaceans.