Photo by Getty/Last Resort
Oceanic researchers recently recorded sounds from the deepest known spot on the seafloor—Challenger Deep, a valley in the Mariana Trench that plunges nearly seven miles beneath sea level—and, as Gizmodo notes, it turns out to be surprisingly noisy down there. There’s all the whale song, earthquake rumble, and even the sounds of ships and typhoons cutting across the surface of the ocean.
To make the recordings, oceanographer Bob Dziak, of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, designed both a custom ceramic hydrophone (or underwater microphone) capable of withstanding the extreme pressure of those depths and also a mooring system for delivering the device to the seafloor and getting it back up. The sounds they captured are spectacular—though perhaps "spectacular" isn't the right word for a realm that has never seen sunlight. (In fact, Challenger Deep lies more than 10 times deeper than sunlight can penetrate below the ocean's surface.) The moan of a baleen whale makes for a gut-shaking bass glissando, while a seafloor earthquake makes Sunn O))) sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks in comparison.
The sonic potential of the ocean isn't new, of course. Composers, field-recording specialists, and multi-media artists have been exploring deep-sea sounds for decades now. Here are some key milestones—or depth markers, anyway—in the field of subaquatic sound.
Humpback Whale – Songs of the Humpback Whale (Capitol, 1970)
In the 1960s, the American biologist and environmentalist Roger Payne was the first researcher to discover the complex vocalizations of humpback whales, which communicate in songlike sequences of repeated phrases. His colleagues Scott and Hella McVay used a thermal-printing sonograph to visualize the whales' vocalizations, which, on paper, resembled musical scores.
This 1970 album of his recordings is credited as one of the key catalysts of the Save the Whales movement; The Wire calls it the best-selling nature recording of all time. National Geographic reissued selections from the album on a 1979 flexidisc printed in an edition of 10.5 million. Nearly half a century later, its array of cries and clicks and dolefully harmonized moans, all wreathed in ghostly ambience, still sound like something beamed back from the distant future.
Gavin Bryars – Sinking of the Titanic (Obscure, 1975)
Inspired by the story that the band on the Titanic is said to have kept playing as the ship went down, Gavin Bryars' Sinking of the Titanic is an elegiac piece for strings that mimics the way sound would travel underwater, with long held tones glinting dully and muted high-ends suggesting the darkness beneath the surface. To create the effect, Bryars researched the acoustic properties of water in a physics laboratory, "simulating the kind of sounds which might have happened if the string players were underwater," he told The Wire in 1996. "But in fact they can't play underwater so we couldn't do that. The depth of water we needed, several miles in the North Atlantic, the speakers wouldn't have stood the pressure. So we had to calculate what would happen and then try and do it in terms of all sorts of things like equalization, delays, all sorts of things like that."
Michel Redolfi – Pacific Tubular Waves / Immersion (INA-GRM, 1979 and 1980
The French composer Michel Redolfi's 1979 suite Pacific Tubular Waves, a product of his fascination with the Pacific Ocean, attempted to map the movements of waves using a Synclavier digital synthesizer. In 1980's Immersion, he dropped a loudspeaker and hydrophone into the ocean at San Diego’s La Jolla Cove, playing back a newly recorded piece underwater and re-recording the effects, then mixing the dry and wet signals three different ways on the resulting album, with silvery filaments of tone seeming to dissolve into streams of bubbles, and waves tossing pebbles into intricate rhythmic patterns. This experiment paved the way for Redolfi’s career-long exploration of underwater music—both playing and performing it—in recordings like Underwater Music and performances like a 2008 concert in a Grenoble swimming pool, in which his compositions were played through underwater speakers to an audience equipped with foam floaties and snorkels.
Edwin van der Heide – Wavescape (Staalplaat, 2003)
In 2001, the Dutch sound artist Edwin van der Heide's created a 24-channel installation in Rotterdam's busy harbor, with 24 hydrophones connected to 24 speakers lining the banks of the water, transmitting the underwater sounds of the port's steady boat traffic—churning propellers, whining engines, and sloshing waves coming together in a gargantuan din. While many underwater recordings emphasize natural phenomena hidden from view, Wavescape reveals the ways in which human activity is penetrating worlds out of our own earshot. (Stream on Spotify here.)
Jana Winderen – The Noisiest Guys on the Planet (Ash International, 2009)
Armed with an array of state-of-the-art hydrophones and microphones, the Norwegian artist Jana Winderen turns field recordings sourced from the remotest corners of the planet into impressionistic and evocative soundscapes such as 2011's Energy Field, an enveloping set of musique concrete recorded in the glaciers, fjords, and ocean of Norway, Russia, and Greenland. Originally released as a limited-edition cassette, The Noisiest Guys on the Planet focuses on the rustling, crackling noises of decapods—scavenging crustaceans, such as crabs, lobsters, prawns, crayfish, whose 10 legs stir up one hell of a racket as they feast, gossip, and mate.
Douglas Quin – Fathom (Taiga, 2010)
The Syracuse, New York, sound designer and composer Douglas Quin created the sound mix for Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about the researchers and workers who winter at bases in Antarctica, but Fathom goes beneath the surface of the ocean at both of the globe's poles. Recorded over a period of 15 years, and identified only by their geographical coordinates, the tracks on Fathom present a nearly unfathomable array of buzzing and whooping sounds. In this clip, it's as though the residents of the seafloor had gotten their hands on a crate full of New Year's Eve noisemakers and whoopee cushions. (You can hear an even more otherworldly sample beneath the listing for Taiga 11 here.)
Lawrence English – Studies for Stradbroke (Room40, 2013)
Australia's Lawrence English flits easily between lulling ambient recordings, full-on noise performances, and more diverse sound-art experiments. His 2015 album Viento is a harrowing blast of field recordings of wind from Pataonia and Antarctica, but these hydrophone recordings from Australia's Stradbroke Island, made in 2007, are far less assaultive. These soundscapes possess a richness that belies their minimal substance—especially when played loud, through good speakers. The low-end rumble of "Reeds of Brown Lake" is particularly satisfying.
Chris Watson – Oceanus Pacificus (Touch, 2015)
Chris Watson, formerly of the pioneering industrial trio Cabaret Voltaire, is today perhaps the world's preeminent field recording artist; he specializes in documentary sound for film, radio, and television, and in his releases on Touch, he often weaves his nature recordings into what he calls "filmic narratives." These 2006 recordings from the Humboldt Current, near the Galapagos, are straight documentary recordings, yet they are almost musical in their bubbling, pinging movements.
David Rothenberg & Michael Deal – New Songs of the Humpback Whale (Important Records, 2015)
Forty-five years after the original Songs of the Humpback Whale, the ecological thinker David Rothenberg and Important Records gathered more recent humpback songs accompanied by new visualizations by the data visualization designer Michael Deal. Together they created a new graphic notation system in order to analyze the structure of whale songs and compare them as they mutate from year to year. Nobody knows why whale songs evolve, though Rothenberg has one theory. "Maybe the whales, like us, just get bored with yesterday's tunes."