Why Do Whales Sing? They Save On The Rates!
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As I say about music (on link below after this post or the Click Here Site a science site of sound.) I think we may have evolved music mostly as a way to control our ideas of sound around us. We couldn't close our ears like our eyes because of evolution favoring us knowing what was going on at night to defend against wild animals. This was unlike vision because we could hear at night even without light so evolution would have our ears in a surround sound mode. Thus with all the sounds around us we felt strongly about day and night because our survival depended on it, to know which animal was where, and when to Watch Vanna's Stone Wheel of Fortune, we would have been much relieved when music was invented because it was organization of the sound where it was disorganized before, an organization is more in control than disorganization, so we got control over something important that boosted our survival.
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Other than via my explanation here via the evolution of music, it's unknown to music or science why whales sing or why they change some of the song and the rest of the whales copy the change. It would also be unknown why just the male whales sing. Because all the whales that sing sing the same song it's not believed that they're using it for courtship. Another explanation has been that the whales are marking out territory. As I say in this link about music I say think of it essentially as a way to control the "image" of sounds. The whales would be out in the ocean, and as they found when they fired up the first sonar to find submarines and boats in the WWII the other fish were making all kinds of sounds. This would be much like us in evolution, we would hear all these sounds our survival depended on we felt strongly about because we had to listen and to control the sound we invented music. And the whales would sing for the same kind of reason, just as listening to music makes a person feel they have more control, the whales would feel more in control with more regularization of the sounds around them than they would without the song. In a sense because we're the sum of all our weaknesses subtracted from all our strengths when we invented music we were expanding our territory by way of being more smart and this improved our survival, so the idea that whales are also marking out territory or at least holding their own also fits with this idea about what the power of our songs or whale's songs is about. And just as people are known to sometimes turn up the volume, the whales are so large that when there would sing they would also have a boom box of their own that no other fish would have as much advantage about, even for a zone of thousands of miles. It's well known that the whales communicate about on the frequency of low C on the high oceans and at this frequency they communicate all the way around the world because they're so loud and the sound carries so well in the water. Before the advent of the noise of boats in evolution a whale say, off the coast of Alaska, could sing a song to a whale south of Africa and be heard and understood. If this is true about the volume and the female whales aren't as loud, perhaps the whales had gotten so good in evolution at drowning out the other fish, the females may have neither had the need or the means to sing. If this explanation of whale song is true and the whales are made stronger by song, if they were deprived of their song a while (by some sort of reversable method no doubt, don't want to hurt the poor 200 ton behemoths) they would get more nervous and not be able to do as well, and to hear their songs in playback may calm them.

Another additional use of whale songs may be to improve their breathing, they stay underwater for an hour or more. Breathing is more like a marathon for whales because the water pressure is higher than our air pressure, so they may want to stay in shape by singing, the females no doubt may do deep DEEP breathing exercises too, the males may do more with more muscle.

Whales may change their song (not just sing it) because of something new to learn and also because of ideas they get from the sounds around them like other fish. While I think much of our ideas about what good music is was originally from the sounds we heard in the wild, to control the sound by capturing the magic of a roar in sound we would make music, much like painting a goddess on the wall of the cave would help us control the tribal magic of the hunt and our awe and fear of evolution in prehistoric life. Even so most Divas will tell you they don't get their ideas from the wild (other than weekend PM/AMs) so the whales would mostly just change their song from a need for something they haven't tried. Each day many people read the encyclopedia just for the Drills and Spills, and no bills or wills, I read the web too!
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It's been believed that whales may change their song because of seasonal events in their life. For example whales off the coast of Hawaii have been seen to change their song at about the same time as whales in the Gulf in Mexico but it's believed the changes of the song in the cetacean blues for a gold planet are because of the environment and not shared communion because there's no way they could hear each other. But whales can make such a loud boom in the water it stuns the small fish and the whales eat the fish and it was a mystery till 2007 how elephants could sense each other many miles distant and know what to do as a cohesive unit with more savvy. They actually found that elephants actually stomp the ground and a sort of code and communicate by way of low frequency vibrations. If a whale in the Gulf of Mexico was nearer the seabed than all the boats with a large blast of sound, the song could be transmitted from the water to the rocks below. The ground transmits sound much faster and stronger than a lighter medium like air (in the Old West they would put their ear to the ground to hear the train to see if the train was near the stationary store) So it's not out of the question that the oceans of the world have been constantly tuned up with the whale songs before the arrival of boats, and the world itself may ring like a bell with the whale songs, or it may have rung for millions of years before the boats.
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Being able to hear low amplitude (volume) sound waves would have been advantagous to whales to find other fish, and via this use of audio ear boosters though the boats stop the whales songs for more than a mile or two, evolution may allow them a way to send RSVIP's by singing a Whaleagram if the neighbors are a bit loud up the road of the beach.

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF MUSIC
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