How to Speak Whale
A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication
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Narrated by:
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Tom Mustill
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By:
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Tom Mustill
About this listen
What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill—the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty-ton humpback whale breached onto his kayak—asks this question in his thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication.
“When a whale is in the water, it is like an iceberg: you only see a fraction of it and have no conception of its size.”
On September 12, 2015, Tom Mustill was paddling in a two-person kayak with a friend just off the coast of California. It was cold, but idyllic—until a humpback whale breached, landing on top of them, releasing the energy equivalent of forty hand grenades. He was certain he was about to die, but they both survived, miraculously unscathed. In the interviews that followed the incident, Mustill was left with one question: What could this astonishing encounter teach us?
Drawing from his experience as a naturalist and wildlife filmmaker, Mustill started investigating human-whale interactions around the world when he met two tech entrepreneurs who wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI)—originally designed to translate human languages—to discover patterns in the conversations of animals and decode them. As he embarked on a journey into animal eavesdropping technologies, where big data meets big beasts, Mustill discovered that there is a revolution taking place in biology, as the technologies developed to explore our own languages are turned to nature.
From seventeenth-century Dutch inventors, to the whaling industry of the nineteenth century, to the cutting edge of Silicon Valley, How to Speak Whale examines how scientists and start-ups around the world are decoding animal communications. Whales, with their giant mammalian brains, virtuoso voices, and long, highly social lives, offer one of the most realistic opportunities for this to happen. But what would the consequences of such human animal interaction be?
We’re about to find out.
©2022 Tom Mustill (P)2022 Grand Central PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“We are on the verge of a revolution in communicating with these smart, social, otherworldly leviathans. Tom Mustill's riveting reports from the cutting edge of science set my heart pounding! How to Speak Whale is one of the most exciting and hopeful books I have read in ages.”—Sy Montgomery, New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus
“Through his highly personal journey and discussions with experts, Tom Mustill conveys the richness of whale song and communication. Most of all we gain immense respect for these giants of the ocean.”—Frans de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of Mama’s Last Hug and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist
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- Length: 4 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Lives of a Cell, Dr. Lewis Thomas opens up to the listener a universe of knowledge and perception that is perhaps not wholly unfamiliar to the research scientist; but the world he explores is also one of men and women, of complex interrelationships, old ironies, peculiar powers, and intricate languages that give identity to the alienated and direction to the dependent. This remarkable work offers a subtle, bold vision of humankind and the world around us - a sense of what gives life - from a writer who seems to draw grace and strength from the very substance of his subject.
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So enlightening and enjoyable!
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By: Lewis Thomas
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The Complete (Short) Guide to Absolutely Everything
- Adventures in Math and Science
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- Narrated by: Hannah Fry, Adam Rutherford
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
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Geneticist Adam Rutherford and mathematician Hannah Fry guide listeners through time and space, through our bodies and brains, showing how emotions shape our view of reality, how our minds tell us lies, and why a mostly bald and curious ape decided to begin poking at the fabric of the universe.
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Humour and understandability.
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A Most Remarkable Creature
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- By: Jonathan Meiburg
- Narrated by: Jonathan Meiburg
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
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An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet's deep past in their family history.
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I don't leave reviews often, but . . .
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By: Jonathan Meiburg
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What a Fish Knows
- The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins
- By: Jonathan Balcombe
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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An underwater exploration that overturns myths about fishes and reveals their complex lives, from tool use to social behavior. There are more than 30,000 species of fish - more than all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. But for all their breathtaking diversity and beauty, we rarely consider how fish think, feel, and behave.
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Title misled me
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The Great Animal Orchestra
- Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places
- By: Bernie Krause
- Narrated by: Bernie Krause
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth.
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Too frustrating to put up with
- By Steve Gross on 07-17-12
By: Bernie Krause
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The Sediments of Time
- My Lifelong Search for the Past
- By: Meave Leakey, Samira Leakey
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
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Preeminent paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey brings us along on her remarkable journey to reveal the diversity of our early pre-human ancestors and how past climate change drove their evolution. She offers a fresh account of our past, as recent breakthroughs have allowed new analysis of her team’s fossil findings and vastly expanded our understanding of our ancestors. Meave’s own personal story is replete with drama, from thrilling discoveries on the shores of Lake Turkana to run-ins with armed herders and every manner of wildlife, to raising her children....
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Brilliant!
- By tess koffler on 04-07-21
By: Meave Leakey, and others
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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
- A New History of a Lost World
- By: Steve Brusatte
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
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In this stunning narrative spanning more than 200 million years, Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field - discovering 10 new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork - masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy.
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"The Rise of the Scientists Who Study Dinosaurs"
- By Daniel Powell on 09-16-18
By: Steve Brusatte
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Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You
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- By: Dan Riskin
- Narrated by: Dan Riskin
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
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It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin explains, it's also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our guide through the natural world at its most gloriously ruthless. Using the seven deadly sins as a road map, Riskin offers dozens of jaw-dropping examples that illuminate how brutal nature can truly be.
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Just a bunch of random animal behaviors.
- By Goddess on 05-18-23
By: Dan Riskin
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The Beak of the Finch
- A Story of Evolution in Our Time
- By: Jonathan Weiner
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
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Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spend 20 years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos, studying natural selection. They recognize each individual bird on the island, when there are 400 at the time of the author's visit or when there are over a thousand. They have observed about 20 generations of finches - continuously.Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.
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Fascinating in-depth look at evolution in action
- By Philip on 05-15-11
By: Jonathan Weiner
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Feathers
- The Evolution of a Natural Miracle
- By: Thor Hanson
- Narrated by: Andy Ingalls
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Feathers are an evolutionary marvel: Aerodynamic, insulating, beguiling. They date back more than 100 million years. Yet their story has never been fully told. In Feathers, biologist Thor Hanson details a sweeping natural history, as feathers have been used to fly, protect, attract, and adorn through time and place. Applying the research of paleontologists, ornithologists, biologists, engineers, and even art historians, Hanson asks: What are feathers? How did they evolve? What do they mean to us?
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Fantastic Science and Fun
- By Chris Reich on 12-28-14
By: Thor Hanson
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Wild Ones
- A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
- By: Jon Mooallem
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
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Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Jon Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it.
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The line between conservation and domestication...
- By Bonny on 04-02-14
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How to Build a Dinosaur
- Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever
- By: Jack Horner, James Gorman
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
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In movies, in novels, in comic strips, and on television, we've all seen dinosaurs - or at least somebody's educated guess of what they would look like. But what if it were possible to build, or grow, a real dinosaur without finding ancient DNA? Jack Horner, the scientist who advised Steven Spielberg on the blockbuster film Jurassic Park and a pioneer in bringing paleontology into the 21st century, teams up with the editor of the New York Times's Science Times section to reveal exactly what's in store.
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Good book but misplaced title
- By Robert on 06-19-15
By: Jack Horner, and others
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What listeners say about How to Speak Whale
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Robert Lydic
- 02-03-23
Whale obsessed
I really appreciated this big picture look at whale and communication and the intersection of biologists, enthusiasts and technology.
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- Sienna
- 02-12-24
Next best thing to nearly being flattened by a breaching humpback whale and living to tell about it
One of those books that will never leave you. Thought provoking, informative and inspiring. It's enough to nudge your life in a different direction.
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- Valari Staab
- 06-20-23
Fascinating
Great catch up on research on whales. I hope we learn much more on my lifetime.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Rebecca Migdal
- 10-28-23
Thoroughly enjoyable—with sound effects!
A fascinating, informative and engaging book that offers new insights into the possibilities of communication with cetaceans and other animals. For the first time I can truly imagine a future where we recognize other creatures in our own world as being much like ourselves. The sound effects make this audiobook a must, even if you own the print version (as I do).
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- Monica Fernandez
- 08-06-24
I loved it
This was a book written by someone who had a fabulous encounter with a whale that sparked a genuine interest to learn about whales. I learned along with him in the book as I also loved whales from far away. I hope we can come together to make the oceans a safer place for all species
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-02-23
Excellent read!
I finished this book in a state of amazement! Tom’s gift for storytelling while intertwining facts is superb. I found myself so engrossed in this book- It is absolutely fascinating. My already great respect for animals of the ocean has grown immensely after listening to Tom’s journey.
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1 person found this helpful
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- andrea
- 09-17-23
My mind is blown!
This book is fantastic- do yourself a favor and download it ❤️ I was very doubtful that “speaking whale” would ever be possible before listening to this book but my eyes have now been opened.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Rose
- 01-29-24
Amazing book!
This is one of the most interesting books I have ever read! The author took a topic I never would have imagined and with each chapter opened up a world of new and interesting topics that opened my mind to amazing possibilities. The author writes from the evolutionary perspective. However, I am a Christian, so as I began to think of the amazing things in nature, it gave me tremendous joy to think of all that our Creator has created.
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- ty garvin
- 03-29-24
An insightful recollection of things to come
I picked this books up as research for a developing thesis regarding animals in literature, and what it delivered changed my focus in the best kind of way. my guiding question: how has anthropomorphism changed with the looming advent of 2 way communication with animals? In the chapter Anthropodenial (hard to spell but not to grasp) I got an overview of history dating back to Descartes, and learned of the deep seeded separation of man from the natural world. what followed was the dissolutionment of animal science as an extension of post enlightenment thinking. Feels good to know, and even better to have read that Tom Mustill along with countless others are making the conscious effort to move away from anthropocentric consciousness as a means to disqualify intersentience. liked it so much I decided to pickup a physical copy for reference.
That said, the book and the tremendous efforts it took to live and write it are admirable for all they do to maintain a conventional tone that is both enjoyable and informative. What is perhaps the most exciting aspect of How to Speak Whale is the optimism it ends on. It would be fascinating to read it's sequel in say 5 or so years when much of what the book ends on comes to fruition, and farther still when and if a whale could ever write a novel of its own, but that's my own imaginative interpretation of what Mustill has convinced me will become possible with what has already been created. 10\10 sparks of the imagination, and a must read for technological enthusiasts looking for life altering leaps forward.
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- whoispoppe
- 11-06-22
Beautifully Performed Narrative
Tom Mustill delivers in this narrative non-fiction dep dive into technology and animal communication. He exposes just enough of the science to give validity to the wonders of the natural world and our conscious neighbors. Excited for the future of understanding paired accelerated with machine learning. Don't read this book expecting practical takeaways beyond a deeper appreciation for the complexity of animals and the earth, but you will be entertained and captivated by his recount of numerous scientists and naturalists doing their part to advance our understanding.
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3 people found this helpful