That's sad, yet beautiful in some way. My first thought was "wow, this whale managed to survive the japanese whalers for that long" but perhaps the japanese don't hunt that far north in the pacific and the fact it's a lone whale doesn't attract much attention. Since they are social animals and the individual is not malformed I would guess the deafness theory makes a lot of sense, but so does being a hybrid (thus a rejected individual). That is quite a story, thanks for sharing.
Evidence that it is a whale and that there is only one: <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967063704001682" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096706370...</a>
If anyone is interested to learn more about the history of recordings, see the following, the first of which has some .wav files holding discussion and recordings, and the second of which is an obituary that reveals much of how such work got started.<p>Schevill, William E., and William A. Watkins. “Whale and Porpoise Voices: A Phonograph Record.” WHOI unnumbered reports. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (contribution 1320), 1962. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1912/7431" rel="nofollow">https://hdl.handle.net/1912/7431</a>.<p>“William A. Watkins.” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Accessed July 7, 2018. <a href="https://www.whoi.edu/mr/obit/viewArticle.do?id=1579&pid=1579" rel="nofollow">https://www.whoi.edu/mr/obit/viewArticle.do?id=1579&pid=1579</a>.
The 10x sped-up recording reminded me of the dial-up handshake tones (this example <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-up_Internet_access" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-up_Internet_access</a> is not a very good match)