Whale Song Artwork

I have recently been informed that visual representations of whale songs are now being considered artwork (thanks for the link Nick). I never knew that I was an artist, but in this digital world apparently it doesn't take much to call something art.

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This image is a spectrogram of a humpback whale song. Unfortunately I wasn't lucky enough to make this recording, but I am lucky enough to work in a place where these sort of things are lying around on the shelf with various other sounds. I created the image for a lecture about dolphin and whale sounds, but now instead perhaps I'll start my own virtual art gallery. I'll let you decide whether its the gallery or the art that is virtual.

Its easy to read the spectrogram: Time is on the horizontal axis, while frequency is on the vertical axis. If you were to print this image as it is, it would be nearly 1cm of paper/second of recording. The colors represent the amount of energy in each frequency band for each unit of time. Its very similar to reading music -- the vertical axis is the staff, and the blobs of color are the notes. White blobs are louder than green blobs are louder than yellow blobs. The higher up on the vertical axis, the higher the pitch.

I'm still planning on posting pictures and an article about my trip to Doubtful Sound, but its taking longer than I planned. The whole place has an interesting story to tell, so I'll do my best to tell it as I saw it, but with a limited amount of free time it could take a while.