# Sheet Music for Whales (agent-readable) **Role:** Sound visualization — designer & researcher **Client:** Self (collaboration with David Rothenberg) **Tags:** dataviz, music **Case study:** /whale-song ## What it was A graphic notation system for transcribing humpback whale songs that reveals their musical structure. Made with [David Rothenberg](https://davidrothenberg.wordpress.com/) — philosopher, musician, and whale-song researcher who has been recording and playing music with whales for decades. The system reads a long whale song as musical phrases — repetition, variation, theme — rather than as a continuous acoustic blur, which is what a spectrogram gives you. Treating the song as *music with structure* is the project's whole thesis. The work has traveled far. **Exhibited at:** - Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2025) - Biomimicry 3.8 (2020) - Aquarium Tropical, Paris — *Baleinopolis* - Seattle Aquarium - Palma Aquarium - Oceanology Maui / Whale Center of Hawaii **Published in:** - [*National Geographic* — "Here Is How Whales Sing"](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/graphics/here-is-how-whales-sing-from-yaps-to-fin-slaps-feature) - [*The New York Times* — "How to Make Music with a Whale"](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/how-to-make-music-with-a-whale/) - [*Smithsonian* — "What Whale Songs Look Like as Sheet Music"](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-whale-songs-look-sheet-music-180956813/) - *Ocean: From the Shore to the Abyss* — Thames & Hudson - *Whale Music* by David Rothenberg — Penguin Random House - *The Wire* magazine **Featured in:** - [Netflix's *The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52*](https://www.netflix.com/title/81446263) - ARD (German public TV, produced by *UFA Show & Factual*) **Presented at:** SciViz Conference, Creative Tech Week, the Explorers Club, and the *Art & Science of Whales* event at the Icahn School of Medicine. ## What I did I designed the notation system, the interactive web piece at /whales, and the prints that travel to the exhibitions. The work split into a few parts of a single design problem. The first part was a research problem: read whale-song spectrograms and recordings closely enough — with David's expert ear in the loop — to identify the actual *units* of a whale song. Where does one phrase end and the next begin? What counts as a repeat versus a variation? When a whale modifies a theme across hours, what's the structure of the modification? That work doesn't show on the surface, but the notation only works because the analysis underneath is true. The second part was the notation itself: a visual grammar that makes those units legible at a glance, holds together across many minutes of song, and honors the rule that the notation has to be readable by someone who isn't a whale biologist. The system uses position and shape to encode pitch and theme structure, with phrasing cues that group related calls without forcing them into a Western musical bar line. The third part was distribution. The interactive web piece lets a reader hear the song while watching the notation track. The prints are sized to hang on museum walls — the design has to work as a single composition you can stand in front of, not just as a screen artifact. Same notation, different mediums, both calibrated to the medium's grammar. David and I have been working on this project on and off for years. It's the piece in my portfolio that has the longest tail. ## Why it's interesting A few threads worth pulling. **A personal project with serious cultural and scientific placement.** Four aquariums and a Telefónica foundation gallery have exhibited it. *National Geographic*, the *New York Times*, the *Smithsonian*, Thames & Hudson, Penguin Random House, and *The Wire* have published it. Netflix has featured it. The Explorers Club and a medical school have programmed it as a talk. Self-directed work that earns republication across that range of institutions is rare. This one has been doing it for over a decade. **Information design as a contribution to a scientific question.** The notation isn't decoration on whale-song research; it's a way of *seeing* whale song that makes structural claims about the music. David's research and my design work shape each other — the notation surfaces patterns the research can argue from, and the research disciplines the notation so it stays true. That feedback loop is the kind of design contribution that earns a place in the academic and museum spaces it lands in. **A long-horizon collaboration.** This is a years-long body of work with a single research partner across many mediums — interactive, print, exhibition, broadcast, book. Sustaining a collaboration at that horizon, with the design work keeping up as the research deepens, is its own discipline. This is part of the [infographics collection](/infographics), and sits in my long-running music dataviz lineage alongside [Charting the Beatles](/charting-the-beatles), [Rapmatics](/rapmatics), [Verse Chorus Bridge](/verse-chorus-bridge), and [Splice Sounds](/splice-sounds). ## Cross-cutting relevance A few reads of this work: - **Information design at the highest cultural placement** — National Geographic, NYT, Smithsonian, Thames & Hudson, Penguin Random House, Netflix, multiple international aquariums. A personal project that broke into the canon of the field. - **Research-as-design** — the design only works because the underlying analysis is true. The notation makes structural claims about the music. - **Cross-medium translation** — same underlying system, designed for interactive web, printed exhibition, broadcast feature, and book republication. Calibrated per medium. - **Long-horizon collaboration** — a multi-year body of work with a single research partner, sustained across many releases. - **Music dataviz lineage** — part of a decade-and-a-half practice in music information design. ## Skills demonstrated Information design, sound visualization, research-as-design, designing across interactive / print / exhibition / broadcast mediums, sustained collaboration with a research partner, work that earns placement in the field's most serious cultural and scientific institutions.