Seismic surveys, oceanic noise and submarine listening.
Exceropt from Routledge Handbook for Environmental History (with Aragorn Eloff).
I drop the needle onto a vinyl album. Industrial diamond meets sound ensnared in polyvinyl chloride. The claw of the record player’s stylus follows the spiral furrow. The jewel follows the wavy plastic groove, every microscopic side-to-side motion conveyed to magnets and wire coils in the stylus’s head. Burned coal and methane, arriving on wires strung across the sky, electrify my amplifier. The power of factories, oil wells, and mines converge. A humpback whale’s song awakens, leaping out of the sea into air, breaching out of the 1950s into an experience of the moment. — David George Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken (2022).
‘I am not prepared to mourn my coastline’ – in her director’s statement for the 2018 sound and video work Becoming Visible, Janet Solomon discusses her attempt to represent the acoustic violence unleashed by seismic surveys off the southern African coastline. Launched by the South African government in 2014, Operation Phakisa (to ‘hurry up’ in Sesotho) aims to ‘unlock the economic potential’ of the country’s maritime territories (more than double its terrestrial size) and to develop the ‘blue economy’. With this comes, Solomon writes, ‘an escalating and unrelenting push for oil and gas development along the east coast of South Africa’. The KwaZulu-Natal coastline, she goes on, experienced its highest ever recording of whale strandings during and after a 2016 marine seismic survey looking for oil and gas reserves, a survey granted an extension into the whale migration season.
Working via multi-channel video and sound, Becoming Visible seeks to bring home the effects of the multi-beam bathymetric sonar used to establish the topography of the sea floor. This is a method involving towed arrays of air guns, which issue pulses of over 200 decibels every ten seconds, for 24 hours a day (human eardrums typically burst at 160 decibels). The challenge presented by the work is its invitation for human listeners (with hearing evolved in the medium of air) to comprehend the very different sonic environment of a watery, submarine space. Soundwaves behave differently below the ocean surface (where hydrophones pick up the same level of sound 12 kilometres away from sources as from two kilometres away). They are faster, more far-reaching and less avoidable for marine organisms (who ‘hear’ with their whole body) even while going (to human ears) largely unheard. How then can regulatory frameworks and environmental impact assessments be extended into worlds set apart from or beyond the human sensorium? Who is listening for, or to, our companion species in the oceans?
An intentionally disorienting and visceral work, Becoming Visible is best experienced, rather than read about. As with Leviathan, an experimental 2012 documentary on industrial fishing off the Massachusetts coast, the filmic soundtrack is not ‘a silent supporter of the image’ (Doane 1985: 47), but rather a means of evoking ‘affective and epistemological confusion’ that explores an ‘assemblage of human, animal and machinic existence’ (Kara and Thain 2014: 191, 187). Yet at several points in Becoming Visible, those speaking attempt to transmute into language the extreme conditions created when sound as industrial, bathymetric barrage has come to override all sense of sound as communicative. Marine scientist Dr Simon Elwen turns repeatedly to terrestrial, urban metaphors of acoustic extremity in order to evoke the underwater world during a survey:
You can, under extreme sound conditions, end up with gas bubbles in the tissue. It causes gas to vibrate, for want of a better word, out of muscle tissue, similar to shaking a can of Coke. And within the ear, it’s similar to humans, you can get damage to the small cells and to the bones. More commonly you’ll get things like permanent or temporary deafening: the classic nightclub example when your ears are ringing in the morning. Or it can be a much more subtle behavioural response, animals don’t like the sound and move away from it, as you might with a jackhammer. And then masking is quite a big one because cetaceans are a very vocal species. They communicate hugely over quite vast distances with sound, and if that sound is being masked, that’s when they have to vocalise louder or vocalise at a different frequency. (Solomon 2018)
‘For want of a better word’ – as an aside, it is worth considering how these deep-sea sonar pulses move across different mediums to arrive at this written text. From seismic blasts, to soundwaves reflected off the ocean floor, picked up by hydrophones towed in kilometres-long ‘streamers’ by ships, they are then mixed into the soundtrack of a documentary and reimagined via language in similes drawn from human experience – in this case the spoken voice of an interviewee, delivered by fibre optic cabling and wifi to the writer of this chapter, then transcribed and typed out for its reader. Working in and with an awareness of environmental sound constantly returns to these chains of transfer The material irreducibility of sound coexists with the phase changes between different technological and symbolic mediums that are necessary convey it and bring it into cultural significance. Perhaps it is the inescapable transduction (to use the technical term) involved in sound engineering, and sonic imagining, that makes the acoustic a compelling way to think experiences beyond the human boundary. OED: transduce: to alter the physical nature or medium (of a signal); to convert variations (in a medium) into corresponding variations in another medium’.
Seismic blasting, the scientific literature shows, unleashes a cascade of effects on marine life, disrupting the nervous, hormonal, endocrine and reproductive systems of organisms ranging from cetaceans, seals, turtles and squid to invertebrates like crabs and molluscs. Yet these seismic spikes are only one aspect of a much larger phenomenon: the rapid and ongoing increase of oceanic noise as a result of global shipping (perhaps the most dramatic historical change within the biosphere’s soundscape across the 20th century). The engine noise of a large container ship is around 190 decibels (the equivalent of a thunderclap or jet taking off on land), which is combined with turbulence from hulls or sterns and the cavitation bubbles that form and implode at the tip of underwater propellers. ‘If there is an acoustic hell’, writes Haskell, ‘it is in today’s oceans’ (2022: 292). And as he goes on to show, the encounter between whale ‘song’ and anthropogenic ‘noise’ in the oceans represents a charged and complex encounter between different currents of environmental sound history.
In 1979, the January edition of National Geographic magazine came with a page of ‘flexi-disc’ vinyl to be cut out and played. Narrated by zoologist Roger Payne, it contained excerpts from his million-copy selling Songs of the Humpback Whale, released in 1970. The National Geographic disc reached ten million more listeners – the largest record pressing in history (Ritts 2017) – and the humpback songs were also etched onto NASA’s 1977 gold-plated LP, Murmurs of Earth, travelling with the Voyager probes into outer space.. In its ‘100 Most Important Records Ever Made’, The Wire magazine grudgingly affords Songs of the Humpback Whales a place on the list, explaining how it broke with existing ideas and formats of ‘nature recordings’:
Until the release of Roger Payne’s now excruciatingly familiar recordings of Humpback whales, the format of sonic entertainment of an extra-human nature tended towards pseudo-science. As one’s stylus tracked across the dark vinyl waste of a birdsong long player, the fauna would be caged off in separate bands, to be named and classified by sepulchral voices in weighty ‘objective’ tones. Payne delivered up the first psychedelic bio-acoustic document. His intentions were prophetically conservationist and the project took off with remarkable force. Despite their limited range of sounds, whales continue to sing the call sign of the New Age and Green movements. (The Wire 1992: online)
Yet even as these whale songs became an iconic sound for emergent environmental movements, their recording history points to a more complex relation between military, industrial and oceanic listening. The recordings had first been made in 1950s Bermuda by the US Navy, where electronic engineers invented and installed hydrophones ‘that eavesdropped on the Atlantic Ocean’ (Haskell 2022: 292). Three kilometres offshore and seven hundred metres down, they hit the ‘deep sound channel’, ‘the lens formed by pressure and temperature gradients that transmits sounds thousands of kilometres’ (Haskell 2022: 292) – and allows whale vocalisations to travel across entire ocean basins. This underwater medium had previously been tapped by military technologies been evolved to detect the threat of icebergs and German U-boats; now it was being tuned into the frequencies of the Cold War.
Passed on to Payne, and then becoming some of the most influential non-human recorded sounds of the 20th century, the humpback whale sounds occupy a cultural niche – or float in an ambient, New Age ether – that is sometimes removed from the history of their own production. If the album was in once sense a landmark of interspecies listening, it was also the product of sonar and echograph technologies which now reach an apotheosis in industrial ‘fish-finding’ and the acoustic violence of seismic prospecting: sound as a means of probing and commodifying the furthest reaches of the biosphere. Listening to whale songs divorced from this context – as solo vocal tracks treated with woozy echo and reverb, isolated from (and perhaps ever working to conceal) the background ‘noise’, in both historical and literal senses – this might risk making them ‘the aural equivalent of synthetic tranquilizers, manufactured anodynes for the senses’ (Haskell 2022: 297).
Even within this iconic environmental sound, in other words, there is a sense in which ‘our cultural imagination is mostly disengaged from the sonic tumult we create’ (Haskell 2022: 318). Solomon’s Becoming Visible draws attention to the extremity of bathymetric sonar, attempting to bring into human understanding a dimly perceived and insufficiently regulated aquatic ‘noise-scape’ where industrial technology is making life unliveable within the oceans. But even when the seismic blast fall silent, the ‘normal’ level of anthropogenic ocean sound shows up an asymmetry, as the global supply chains of modern container shipping impinge remorselessly on worlds beyond human audition. ‘I have seldom seen or heard whales’, Haskell remarks, seeking to make reciprocal links between suburban quiet and oceanic uproar: ‘But the whales hear me. They are immersed in the sounds of my purchases from over the horizon every day of their lives’ (2022: 308).