The cause was pelvic cancer, said his wife, Lisa Harrow.

By the time Dr. Payne discovered whale songs in the late 1960s, the creatures had started to disappear from the world’s oceans, decimated by industrial hunting operations that killed tens of thousands of whales each year. His research, and the release of his 1970 album “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” transformed attitudes toward a creature that was variously prized as a lucrative source of meat and blubber, feared as a Jonah-swallowing leviathan of the deep, and ignored as just another fish in the sea (even if it was technically a mammal).

David Gruber, a marine biologist who collaborated with Dr. Payne in recent years, said his recordings “sparked the ‘Save the Whales’ movement, one of the most successful conservation initiatives in history, which saved several whale populations from extinction.” Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, inaugurating new protections for whales, dolphins and other animals, and in 1982 the International Whaling Commission voted to implement a moratorium on commercial whaling.

“To scientists and conservationists,” Gruber added in an email, “Roger will be remembered not only for saving the whales, but for teaching humanity how to marvel at the wonders of the natural world, and hopefully save ourselves in the process.”

Dr. Payne remained endlessly fascinated by animal hearing and communication. A classical music lover who had played the cello since childhood, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on barn owls, demonstrating how they could locate a mouse using hearing alone, and later studied moths, marveling in an interview with Nautilus magazine that they could detect the approach of a bat “even though each moth ear contains just three sense cells.”

As he told it, he was motivated not just by curiosity but by a sense of ecological obligation, looking for research subjects that could spur people to take action against “the destruction of the wild world.” He turned toward whales after seeing another cetacean, a dolphin, wash up near Boston, where it was mutilated by beachgoers who hacked away at its tail, carved initials into its flanks and stuffed a cigar butt inside its blowhole.

“I thought to myself, ‘Is this the only interaction that can occur between people and the wild world?’ I sat there, soaked to the bone, and decided it would be wonderful to do something about this,” he told Britain’s Observer newspaper in 2020. “I had no chance of that at that moment, but a chance slowly appeared.”

Following an acquaintance’s suggestion, he traveled to Bermuda in 1967 to meet Frank Watlington, an underwater acoustics specialist who had worked for the Navy. While using underwater microphones to track Soviet submarines, Watlington had recorded unusual rhythmic sounds that he played for Dr. Payne in the engine room of his research vessel, shouting over the generator’s roar, “I think these may be whales!”

“In spite of the racket, what I heard blew my mind,” Dr. Payne told Nautilus in 2021. “It seemed obvious that here, finally, was a chance to get the world interested in preventing the extinction of whales.”

Still, it took time to realize exactly what he was hearing. There were no breaks between the calls, which would sometimes continue for hours, and it could take 30 minutes for a call to repeat. Only after he began using Watlington’s tape as an alarm clock, waking up to it each morning for about 40 days, did he realize that the animals — in this case humpback whales — were repeating themselves.

Working with a research team that included his first wife, Katy Payne, and another colleague, Scott McVay, Dr. Payne used a sound spectrograph to analyze the recordings and demonstrate that the calls had rhythms and repetitions, features that led him to use the term “song” to describe the vocalizations. He and McVay published the group’s findings in a 1971 article in the journal Science, noting that “the function of the songs is unknown.”

Since then, Dr. Payne and other researchers have continued to make advances in studying whale songs, which serve as a form of communication and play a role in mating, according to Gruber, a professor at Baruch College in New York. Dr. Payne notably proposed that whale vocalizations could be heard thousands of miles across the ocean, a theory that was later confirmed in experiments by one of his former students, Christopher Clark.

In 1971, Dr. Payne founded the Ocean Alliance, a research and advocacy group now based in Gloucester, Mass. He went on to conduct hundreds of research trips, living with Katy Payne and their four children in Argentina for a time while studying right whales, and wrote books including “Among Whales” (1995). He also co-wrote and co-directed a 45-minute Imax film, “Whales: An Unforgettable Journey,” narrated by actor Patrick Stewart.

But he remained best known for “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” a 34-minute, five-track record — song titles include “Solo Whale” and “Three Whale Trip” — that sold more than 100,000 copies. Musicians including Judy Collins and Kate Bush used excerpts from the recordings, and in 2010, the album was added to the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.

To Dr. Payne’s delight, some of the whale songs were also included on a golden record aboard NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, which was launched in 1977 and has since crossed into interstellar space. Their inclusion, alongside other animal sounds and music, meant that any extraterrestrial with a record player could hear what Dr. Payne considered “the longest, loudest, slowest music made by any creature.”

The younger of two children, Roger Searle Payne was born in Manhattan on Jan. 29, 1935. His father was an electrical engineer, and his mother was a music teacher who played the viola and filled the home with classical music.

From a young age, Dr. Payne was convinced he belonged in the country, not the city. He spent much of his free time rambling through Central Park or sailing Long Island Sound, and at age 18 he traveled to Alaska for the summer, working as an excavator at a gold mine near Fairbanks.

After graduating from the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, he studied biology at Harvard University. He earned a doctorate from Cornell University in 1961, taught at Tufts University and returned to New York in 1966 to join the faculty of Rockefeller University, finding a home in the Bronx that looked out over the Palisades and the Hudson River instead of the jagged cityscape to the south.

Dr. Payne launched conservation programs at the New York Zoological Society, now the Wildlife Conservation Society, and in 1984 received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, also known as a “genius grant.” He soon stopped teaching to focus on the Ocean Alliance, and around that same time befriended another MacArthur fellow, novelist Cormac McCarthy, who traveled with him to Antarctica and attended his 1991 wedding to Harrow, a New Zealand-born actress he met at a Greenpeace rally.

“Roger and Cormac were joined at the hip,” said Harrow, noting that Dr. Payne died just days before McCarthy. “God, they could crack each other up. I don’t believe in heaven — I’m a rational atheist — but I just know that they’re now somewhere up there causing havoc.”

Dr. Payne’s marriage to Katy Boynton, a zoologist who moved from whales to elephants, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Harrow, survivors include his four children, John, Holly, Laura and Sam Payne; a stepson, Tim Neill-Harrow; and 11 grandchildren.

Five days before his death, Time magazine published an essay by Dr. Payne calling for a new conservation movement. He was working with Gruber on an initiative called Project CETI, which aims to translate sperm whale vocalizations, and hoped its findings would remind people of the interdependence of life on Earth.

“As my time runs out,” he wrote, “I am possessed with the hope that humans worldwide are smart enough and adaptable enough to put the saving of other species where it belongs: at the top of the list of our most important jobs.”