Details
The acclaimed live audio spectacular. Performed live featuring hundreds of rare sound recordings from the sea.


⭐️⭐️⭐️ Premiered by whale lover Cerys Matthews on BBC 6 Music ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Suitable for children and all ages (featured in the BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures)

Fresh from packed audiences at Hay Festival, The Natural History Museum, British Library Late (With Cosmo Sheldrake), Shambala Festival, COP28 Green Zone main stage, The Oxford Museum of Natural History, Kardamyli Festival (with special guests Merlin Sheldrake and Emily Wilson), NYU, Extinction Rebellion Ocean’s Day, Glastonbury, Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts, NYC Explorers Club, Blue Ocean Summit.

 

How To Be A Whale is a bioacoustic listening journey – a soundscape of hundreds of extraordinary and rare scientific recordings mixed live into a stunning and beautiful experience like no other.

 

Narrated by multi-award winning BBC filmmaker and Whale and Dolphin Conservation Ambassador Tom Mustill , author of international phenomenon How To Be A Whale and DJ’d by musician and acoustic inventor Vahakn Matossian.

 

How To Be A Whale is a story told through the lives of seven different whales and dolphins woven from their astonishing voices and those of the fish, seals, sea urchins and other marine lives – from the pilot whales hunting squid on underwater volcanoes, to Bowhead whales singing among arctic ice floes,  orcas chorusing as they hunt herring and sperm whales greeting the birth of a new calf.

 

Led through a story of what we have discovered of cetacean lives in every sea, you will be rumbled by blue whale and fin whale voices far beneath human hearing and astonished by the beauty, strangeness and power of the songs of the humpback whale.

 

This celebration of the sounds of the sea has been created from thousands of treasured recordings entrusted to Tom and Vahakn by scientists across the world, with support from the charity Whale And Dolphin Conservation. Its goal is to help people empathise with, be astonished by and imagine the lives of whales and dolphins. It includes some of the very oldest newly digitised recordings, others fresh from the seas and some rarities few people have ever heard. Close your eyes and be moved, surprised and changed by the wonder of the living ocean.

 

Inspired by Tom’s friend and mentor, Dr Roger Payne, who discovered whalesong.  As featured on BBC R4 as well as French, Finnish, US, Australian, Icelandic and Spanish television and radio and broadcast at anti-whaling marches.