The Living Voice

How a Single Humpback Makes, Carries, and Learns Its SongBy Rowan Cassidy
Listen with Sir Michael Caine™ and 1,000+ voices
Length49m

About this audiobook

In the warm winter water off Hawaii, a single humpback hangs head-down in the blue and pours out one of the longest, most intricate songs in the animal world — and inside that song is a life almost no one hears. The Living Voice follows one whale down to the scale where the wonder happens: the male off Maui building his song from nested phrases and themes like a composer working without a page; a voice that travels hundreds of miles through a hidden corridor in the deep sea to reach a listener it will never meet; the single season a whole population sets down the song it has sung for years and takes up a new one; and the calf in the bright shallows learning the song of its kind simply by being steeped in it. Four stories, about an hour of listening, that turn a famous sound into something stranger and more intimate than any recording of it.

Audiobook details

GenreScience and Nature
Length49 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJun 23, 2026
LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1The Song Off Maui
2A Voice Across the Pacific
3The Year the Song Changed
4What the Young One Learns

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