(This just blew me away...)
"Blue whales, the largest animals that have ever lived, have ten times as many neurons as we do, devoted entirely to picking up sounds below 100Hz, way beneath the lowest notes of the piano. We can barely hear what they are doing. A blue will make one long, dark moan, lasting up to half a minute, and then wait exactly seventy seconds and make the same sound. Over and over again, in an exact but very slow rhythm, for days. In the Indian Ocean, they do it every 140 seconds." (p. 196)
"No human musician could stay in time counting as slowly as these whales do. These incredibly low thumps and moans are rhythms at so lax a pace that they are barely perceivable by human beings. Speed a blue whale song up ten times, and thirty minutes becomes three. Move the pitch up to the realm of a cello, bowhead, or a human moan and exactly every three seconds comes the same soft moan. Only at this slow sense of time do we hear the thousand mile song, a great sigh in the deep sound channel, echoing from one end of an ocean to another." (p. 200)
-David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound (2008)
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