Annie Lewandowski is a composer, performer, and senior lecturer in the Department of Music at Cornell University. In 2017, she began studying humpback whale song with pioneering bioacoustician Katy Payne. Ms. Lewandowski’s 2018 composition, “Cetus: Life After Life,” for humpback whale song and chimes, explores the evolution of Hawaiian humpback song from 1977-1981. She has been awarded grants from the Atkinson Center for Sustainability for her research exploring the creative minds of humpback whales and collaborated with Google Creative Lab to create the broadly adopted public web tool “Pattern Radio: Whale Songs” for teaching AI to recognize patterns in humpback whale song. Ms. Lewandowski has released ten recordings with her band Powerdove and has presented her work at festivals and venues across the United States and Europe, including the Casa da Musica (Porto, Portugal), the Hippodrome (London), the Frieze Arts Fair (London), and REDCAT (Los Angeles). She is a 2014 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow.
Event Overview
Fifty years ago, pioneering bioacoustics researchers Roger Payne, Ph.D. ’61, and Katy Payne ’59 produced “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” The best-selling album introduced the sophisticated, highly structured songs of whales to the world and helped launch a global moratorium on commercial whaling.
Inspired by the album and her own research, artist Annie Lewandowski recently developed the installation performance “Siren – Listening to Another Species on Earth,” which was displayed at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in September 2021 during “The Whale Listening Project.”
In this webcast, Ms. Payne and Ms. Lewandowski will share their insights on audience response to the four-day event and discuss future plans.
RESOURCES / NEXT STEPS
HAWAIIAN HUMPBACK WHALES: Scientific and Creative Perspectives
The Ever-Evolving Songs of Humpback Whales
Cetus: Life After Life - Whale/Chimes Duet
Tiffany Ng performs Cetus: Life After Life
PATTERN RADIO: WHALE SONGS
Speakers
In 1959, Katy Payne received a Cornell B.A. in Music (with honors) and in Biology; since then her professional work and contributions have all stemmed from original discoveries at the intersection of these fields. Humpback whales sing long songs that change extensively, progressively, and rapidly with time – an example of non-human cultural evolution with endlessly fascinating details. Ms. Payne’s discovery of song-changing led to 15 years of recording and examining whale songs from the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with many mysteries still unresolved. Ms. Payne changed direction in 1984 when she, with E M Thomas and W.R. Langbauer, discovered that elephants make powerful low-frequency calls, some of which are infrasonic and travel long distances. That finding led to two decades of field work in Africa focused on elephants’ acoustic communication. In 2004, she founded the Elephant Listening Project, in the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for purposes of research and conservation. Upon retiring from the Lab in 2006, Ms. Payne took up violin building, as a student of the Ithaca luthier Dylan Race.
Funding for all Ms. Payne’s recognized work came from grants — from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society (and its precursor the New York Zoological Society), the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Conservation International, the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare — as well as from book writing (“Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants,” [Simon & Schuster, 1998]). Along the way Ms. Payne received several honors and awards. More importantly, recognition of her findings has brought increased attention to the extraordinary and only half- understood animals whose wonderful calls and songs fill the forests, savannas, and oceans.
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Fifty years ago, pioneering bioacoustics researchers Roger Payne, Ph.D. ’61, and Katy Payne ’59 produced “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” The best-selling album introduced the sophisticated, highly structured songs of whales to the world and helped launch a global moratorium on commercial whaling.
Inspired by the album and her own research, artist Annie Lewandowski recently developed the installation performance “Siren – Listening to Another Species on Earth,” which was displayed at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in September 2021 during “The Whale Listening Project.”
In this webcast, Ms. Payne and Ms. Lewandowski will share their insights on audience response to the four-day event and discuss future plans.
RESOURCES / NEXT STEPS
HAWAIIAN HUMPBACK WHALES: Scientific and Creative Perspectives
The Ever-Evolving Songs of Humpback Whales
Cetus: Life After Life - Whale/Chimes Duet
Tiffany Ng performs Cetus: Life After Life
PATTERN RADIO: WHALE SONGShttps://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K111121/primaryAmerica/New_YorkeCornell