Researcher Spotlight: A Dive into the Significance of Capturing Underwater Sound

John Shiga, Graduate Program Director, PhD Media & Design Innovation and Associate Professor at TMU’s School of Professional Communication embarked on his "Audible Oceans" project as a resident researcher at The Creative School Catalyst. 

"Audible Oceans" is a multi-year project that focuses on the use of audible sound captured underwater in the 20th and 21st centuries. It looks at the way underwater sound detection infrastructures shape relations between technology, society and the environment.

The project aims to engage scholars and the public in the use of underwater sound not only for military purposes but also for the general understanding of life underneath the ocean. 

“There’s a surge of interest in underwater life, not just for scientists but for the general public as well, and underwater sound is a very important and interesting aspect of understanding ocean space,” said Shiga.

Underwater sound detection technology was initially used to detect military threats underwater, said Shiga. This was especially the case in the early 20th century and during the Cold War where underwater sound sensors were used to find military submarines in the Atlantic and the Pacific.

For Shiga, underwater sound detection goes beyond the control of the military. Shiga looks at the use of infrastructure by organizations and individuals for purposes that don’t fall under the “military” domain. 

In the late 20th century, some of the techniques for underwater listening allowed people to understand the effects of sound detection techniques on marine mammals. That research led to criticism of the ways the military used high-intensity sound detection techniques that disrupted underwater life, said Shiga.

“It’s really a story about the changing of hands of underwater sound and underwater listening from the military to ocean science, environmental activism and even into art and culture. It’s a very exciting series of changes you see in our relationship with underwater sound,” he said.

A lot of the existing work on underwater sound and ocean sound is very technical. It focuses on the military aspect of the use of the technologies, theories of underwater sound and technical aspects of how sound propagates through the water. 

While this literature provides insights into the strategic value of ocean sound, it gives little attention to the social contexts that motivate and shape the goal of underwater sound technologies and practices, said Shiga.

“How we listen to the ocean, what we’re listening for, what we do with those sounds, it’s all tied up with a broader picture of what our relationship should be towards ocean space,” said Shiga. “That’s the part that I’m trying to zoom in on and contribute back to the literature.”

Shiga’s fascination with underwater sound research began with his interest in American physician John Lilly’s project on the use of underwater sound in the 60s. His unconventional research techniques were eye-catching: establishing two-way communication with dolphins, trying to teach dolphins to speak English, even creating houses flooded with water to allow humans and dolphins to live together in an attempt to surround dolphins with a human language.

“This was one part of a much larger program of research on underwater sound and I wanted to learn more about the context that made that research possible,” he said.

His first audio-visual project “The Dolphin House” came about when Shiga was doing archival research on Lilly’s dolphin-human communication project.

“What really opened my eyes to the multimedia possibilities was that [archivists] digitized a lot of the audio recordings from Lilly’s  lab,” said Shiga. “The researchers  used these recordings instead of written lab notes because, you can imagine, in that kind of environment, it would have been very difficult to write and make sure the paper doesn’t get wet and distorted.”

Shiga recreated the soundscape of the research lab room by room. The composition takes the audience from the downstairs tank to the electronics room to Lilly’s office, creating a virtual tour. The different audio channels are presented in waveform, allowing the audience to differentiate between human sounds, dolphin sounds and Cold War activity sonifications from that time. Animated black and white photos appear alongside the waveforms, as well as a 3D rendering of the house and a 3D map that help bring the lab to life.

“It tries to not just revisit the lab but bring it to life in new ways, bring it into the context of the Cold War, and put it into a form that people find engaging and accessible,” said Shiga.

The Dolphin House was showcased at the Student Learning Centre, allowing students to view and interact with the project using headphones to listen to sounds. 

Shiga’s more recent “Don River Data Sonification Project” turns water and weather conditions of the Don River in Toronto into a soundscape. The project explores data collected by the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority (TRCA) on wind, water level, temperature and precipitation from 2023.

The “Don River Data Sonification Project” combines the data on the Don River with solar activity data to create a 24-minute soundscape consisting of unique voices for each data stream. Some of the sounds are synthesized, such as the sounds triggered by solar activity, while sounds of wind, rain, snow and underwater currents were recorded along the Don River. With the tempo at 60 beats per minute and the amount of time to represent a year set to 1,460 seconds, the project presents each day in one bar of music in 4/4 time. This allows the listener to pinpoint weather and season changes within a year through sound.