Megaptera novaeangliae, breaching

Humpback whales produce moans, grunts, blasts and shrieks in a frequency range of 30 Hz to 8 kHz which make up their complicated "songs." 
The illustration below is a sound spectrogram of an 8-minute recording of a humpback whale song, made by Navy ocean-bottom surveillance microphones in the western North Atlantic. Under these recording conditions, only the low frequency components of the song are preserved. To hear the recording, click on the spectrogram. The sound you will hear is speeded up ten times faster than normal speed, which also raises the pitch of the whale sounds by a factor of ten (slightly more than three octaves). At this speed, the humpback song is audible as a series of high-pitched chirps and whistles.

In real time, the grunts, gurgles, moans, and screams that comprise the elements of the humpback song are gutteral and "flatulent" sounds. The illustration below is a sound spectrogram of several individual calls. Click on the spectrogram to hear the recording.

Another Humpback example:
To see a more detailed spectrogram and hear another example of a singing humpback whale, recorded off of Hawaii recorded on 27 March 1998 during Phase III of the Low-Frequency Sound Scientific Research Program, speeded up 5 times faster than normal speed, click here.

Photograph by Adam Frankel.