About Lisa Walker
Walker creates hybrid music shaped by the shared architecture of humpback and human communication. Her work explores what “organized sound” means across species, blending melodic structure, rhythmic patterning, and spectral nuance in ways that both humans and whales can perceive as intentional, patterned, and meaningful. Drawing on her field experience and the unique insight that comes from participating in an interactive vocal exchange with a humpback whale, she uses algorithms to cross‑blend musical and bioacoustic traits, stretching human musical forms toward whale syntax, and reshaping whale song motifs into structures humans can intuitively follow. Through adaptive algorithms, she amplifies or alters qualities like rhythm, phrasing, harmonic tension, and call‑and‑response timing so the resulting pieces resonate within the perceptual worlds of both species. The result is a new kind of interspecies music: co‑designed, co‑interpretable, and built to meet the cognitive and acoustic requirements of two very different listeners.
I was first introduced to humpback whales in Alaska in 1996. It was thought that with my musician’s ear I might help reveal patterns in feeding calls that were not readily evident to the scientist. My first musical interaction with whales came in 1999 in Hawaii, when I fed violin sounds underwater and a whale rose beneath the boat to sing with me. But was I imitating him, or he me? With roots in classical violin and traditional African drumming, my artistic journey spans more than 25 years of deep exploration into the biological origins of music and musicality. I bring a hybrid approach to my work, combining artistic intuition with rigorous scientific inquiry. Using tools from artificial intelligence and information theory, I analyze whale song for underlying mathematical patterns, symmetry, repetition, and algorithmic structures, and translate these findings into new compositional frameworks.
At the core of my practice is a scientific methodology that guides every stage of inquiry. I treat whale song as a dynamic, evolving communication system, applying hypothesis‑driven analysis, controlled comparisons, and iterative testing to track structural change over time. This disciplined approach allows me to move fluidly across fields, bioacoustics, computation, music theory, and evolutionary communication, while maintaining a consistent framework for evaluating evidence and generating new insights. It is the scientific method that enables my work to remain both creative and empirically grounded.