A great post over on Artemia, a University of British Columbia blog, from Jessi Lehman, reflecting on listening to the LIDO online undersea sound streams.  Go read the whole thing for sure!

A teaser:

…These ocean observatory networks are about science and whale conservation but also about industry, development, and geopolitics.

But I want to come back to the experience of listening. What is it, exactly, that we hear? Mostly just faint static, like the sound of rain falling. Mostly I find myself listening in apprehension, for what could be there. Some would call this kind of undersea listening remote sensing, but it feels more like interspecies or even otherworldly eavesdropping. To be honest, it feels a bit weird. And it’s not just that I’m so far from the ocean, in a place dry and hot and decidedly un-marine. I can’t say that I understand the undersea environment better by listening to these sounds (though I can’t preclude the possibility that on some level I do). Mostly I am made aware that this is a world I don’t know, can’t know, and can only access thanks to complex technological mediations – and even then only marginally. This makes the experience of listening even stranger.

French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes “to be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning”…

Quite of few of the posters on Artemia seem to be giving a lot of consideration to sound.  Of special note is this project preview from a student who’s right now on the central coast of British Columbia aiming to bring some of Steve Feld’s ideas about acoustemology into the underwater world of cetacean sound-making:

My project puts the concept to work at a whale research laboratory, Cetacea Lab, located on a remote island in Caamaano Sound, Northern, BC. Through a seven-week fieldwork residency (August- September 2012), I hope provoke thoughts on how broader knowledges relate to sustained acts of whale listening. In particular, I will pursue two questions 1. how work in acoustemology, hitherto focused on Indigenous encounters in the developing world, can be challenged and extended by an outdoor laboratory science setting, (Feld, 1996, 2003; Daniels, 2008; Maxwell, 2008; Ramnarine, 2009); 2. to understand how Cetacea Lab’s activities produce an acoustemology of Caamano Sound and its environs.

The central actors of the pilot study are the scientists who conduct Cetacea Lab’s activities. Since 2001, Cetacea Lab scientists have been monitoring whale activity through a network of radio-linked hydrophones, remote observation, and boat-based surveys. Every summer, their efforts are supplemented by two groups of volunteers (5-7 per group), who live at Cetacea Lab for 6-8 week periods (May-July; late July-September). These volunteers provide crucial support for the monitoring activities required during ‘peak’ times of cetacean activity: In late summer especially, Caamano Sound, and neighbouring Campania Sound and Whale Channel play host to an array of migratory and resident fin, humpback, and killer whales variously involved in annual mating, feeding, and socializing… (Ford et al, 1989, 2007). Hearing all the complex sonic activity generated by these creatures is perhaps the most pronounced feature of daily life at Cetacea Lab…