About Lisa Walker
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I am a musician and composer interested in creating a universal communication protocol, one that could be recognized as meaningful by an intelligence that does not share human language, culture, biology, or environment. My hypothesis is that music offers a viable structural model for interspecies and potentially interstellar communication.
My work is informed by the scientific frameworks of SETI and METI. Central to my inquiry is the study of humpback whale song, the most complex and dynamically evolving vocal system known in the non‑human world. By analyzing its hierarchical organization and transformation, I treat whale song as an “alien analog”, a living proxy for testing how structured signals maintain coherence amid noise, distance, and perceptual uncertainty. My research is grounded in scientific collaboration, including participation in the landmark “Twain” study, a documented "conversation" between the WhaleSETI team and a humpback whale. I am the producer of the eight‑part docuseries Whales & Aliens: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Salish Sea (2026) and the composer of the album Beyond Human: Songs for Other Species (2026).
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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.