Fascinating article by David Rothenberg and imagery by Mike Deal on visualizing whale songs as sheet music. Their video (2:40 min) of whale songs superimposed on nightingales is just as impressive.

I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems likely to me that every urge that we, as humans, have to transmit and receive information stems from really ancient wiring. Living things of all kinds were vibrating the earth's atmosphere long before we harnessed radio waves.

It also makes sense to me that evolution would favor elegantly transmitted information. It's probably the reason we "enjoy" music in the first place. Elegance and beauty in nature, like great music, are the products of relentless practice—the kind of practice whales and birds have had for longer than we can imagine.

In some ways, whales and birds may be even more advanced than we are. After all, we only recently dispatched the dial-up modem.

Maybe the evolutionary apex of organic communication is indistinguishable from a song. Maybe music approaches the most fundamental antithesis of universal chaos: the harmonic ordering of waves and particles.