If the current state of publishing is anything to go by, the classical music industry and music academia are in a state of crisis. This will come as little surprise to anyone either teaching, researching, or studying music, or existing in the professional world of musical performance. The mushrooming of edited volumes, journal articles, and think-pieces such as op-eds and podcasts, all offering perspectives on variations of classical music’s ‘challenges’ and ‘futures’ is notable, and has only accelerated in recent years. More important than this quantity, however, is the sheer diversity of opinions, revealing how widely the ideological fissures across all corners of academic music studies and the classical music industry have deepened. Fraught debates have spilled over from the relatively insular bubbles of social media discourse and academic publications into national headlines.

I’m sat at my office desk writing this review when I receive a notification on my phone. An alert of this kind would usually be unworthy of comment. Yet, this notification informs me of a recent BBC News article on sperm whale vocalization. Intrigued, I read the story, which explains how a team of Cetacean Translation Initiative (Ceti) researchers, led by PhD student Pratyusha Sharma at MIT, are using AI technology to analyse large bioacoustics datasets of sperm whale clicks. Their analysis shows that the combining of clicks in sperm whale communication appears to parallel the grouping of phonemes to create words in human languages. What the whales’ different rhythmic sequences of clicks — called ‘codas’ — mean, however, is still unknown. Scientists have, so far, only caught a glimpse of the lives of sperm whales, and so it is impossible to know at this stage what information is carried by particular combinations of codas.1