Co-Designed Music

I create hybrid music shaped by overlapping structures in humpback whale and human song. My work explores what organized sound can mean across species, drawing on melodic structure, rhythmic patterning, and spectral detail that both humans and whales can perceive as intentional and patterned. Informed by direct acoustic interaction with humpback whales, I use adaptive algorithms to cross‑blend musical and bioacoustic traits, stretching human musical forms toward whale syntax while reshaping whale motifs into structures humans can intuitively follow. Through this process, qualities such as rhythm, phrasing, harmonic tension, and call‑and‑response timing are amplified or transformed so the resulting works resonate within the perceptual worlds of two very different listeners. The result is an emerging form of interspecies music: co‑designed, co‑interpretable, and built to meet the cognitive and acoustic conditions of both whales and humans.

Songs Between Species presents a collection of compositions shaped by ongoing experiments in cross‑species communication with North and South Pacific humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). The album investigates how elements of musical architecture might operate as shared communicative features across fundamentally different systems. 

Each track sits at the boundary between human and humpback logic. The idea here is if we can align ourselves with another mind’s logic, we are already halfway to connection. 

The compositions emerge from algorithmic processes that sample traits of whale song while remaining grounded in human compositional constraints. Each piece takes humpback song and algorithmically translates, transfers, or transposes specific qualities onto a computationally structured human musical framework. The original recordings never appear directly; instead, they act as the raw material the system interprets. Every track occupies a threshold space between human and humpback reasoning, built from an ongoing dialogue between whale‑song structure and human musical design. Depending on the intention of a piece, the compositional rules shift, sometimes following the internal logic of whale song, sometimes leaning into human pattern‑making, yet always retaining enough familiarity for listeners to recognize the result as music. Melodic organizational mapping offers the clearest example of this transpositional approach: a track may begin with a sweep or gesture modeled on a snippet of whale song, its pitch curvature fed into the algorithm that expands and elaborates upon that initial melodic scaffold.

Available on Apple Music and Spotify :

 Beyond Human: Songs Between Species - Album by Lisa Walker Grooved Whale Project | Spotify

 ‎Beyond Human: Songs Between Species - Album by Lisa Walker Grooved Whale Project - Apple Music  

Grooved Whale is one of those projects that refuses to sit neatly in either the scientific or artistic domain. Built from field recordings of humpback whales, it operates as both a listening experience and a research artifact. The work grew out of a process in which I trained my own ear, and eventually my compositional instincts, to recognize the internal logic of whale song and feeding calls. By studying their patterns, repetitions, and structural pivots, my brain began to map these structures in a way that could be folded into musical composition. What started as instinctive listening gradually became more mathematical, allowing whale‑based structures to merge with their human communication system counterparts. In the end, the album reflects a kind of shared architecture - music shaped by two intelligences meeting in the same sonic space.

Available on Bandcamp :

https://groovedwhale.bandcamp.com/album/grooved-whale