Until recently most research on whale songs and calls has been confined to the shallows of coastlines, with only brief forays into the vastness of the whales’ deep ocean domain. Roger Payne once proposed that prior to the advent of modern shipping the largest of all earth’s creatures, blue and fin whales, might have communicated across oceans. Over the last fifteen years, through access to the Navy’s Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), there is now ample evidence of whale detections across ocean basins. This acoustic telescope allows descriptions of whale communication systems on large spatial and temporal scales commensurate with their ecologies and ocean habitats, often in contradiction to existing assumptions. Songs of pelagic species (blue and fin whales) are intense, infrasonic (<20Hz), narrow band, simple, and stereotypic: features advantageous for ultra-long-range communication and navigation in the deep ocean. The songs of coastal species (e.g., right and bowhead whales) are intense, low frequency (<1000Hz), broad-band, complex, and highly variable: features advantageous for both mid-range communication in shallow water. Individuals sing for many months, before, during and after migration, as they slalom from one bathymetric feature to the next, their voices reflecting off continental shelves, seamounts and islands. Cohorts of singers move as acoustic herds spread out over areas of 100,000 square miles. Singing occurs in high latitudes during summer months, in association with concentrations of food, and during periods of intense feeding. Population numbers and distributions can now be monitored on ocean scales once thought impossible. Paradoxically, these opportunities to finally perceive the lives of great whales are slowly disappearing into the smog of human generated acoustic pollution, which in some areas has reached chronic levels that now compromise the whales’ basic abilities to hear and communicate.