Mass Productions Recovers Audio Reels of First Humpback Whale recordings

Mass Productions recovered over 300 audio reels of the first known recordings of humpback whales in 2020.

These recordings were made by Frank Watlington and Dr. Robert Payne of Ocean Alliance in Gloucester Massachusetts.

A CLIR recordings at Risk grant paid to have these historical recordings recovered for research.

The 60 year old tapes required cleaning to remove decades of mold and dust.

Mass Productions carefully cleaned the tapes with a proprietary tape cleaning system and put the cleaned tapes onto new reels and tape boxes.

Then Mass productions digitized the audio reels to high resolution 96Khz/24 bit wave files for preservation.

Mass Productions is now preserving another 900 more audio reels to add to the online Whale Acoustic Library.

The audio library is available online.