The sound of silence (cracking icebergs and whales LIVE!)

[Songhai Profile]

http://icecast.awi.de:8000/PALAOA.MP3.m3u

You can listen to the underwater sound of the Antarctic Ocean with a delay of a few seconds here.

Please note, this transmission is not optimized for easy listening, but for scientific research. It is highly compressed (24kBit Ogg-Vorbis), so sound quality is far from perfect. Additionally, animal voices may be very faint. Amplifier settings are a compromise between picking up distant animals and not overdriving the system by nearby calving icebergs. So you might need to pump up the volume - but beware of sudden extreamely loud events.

cientific background: Marine mammals use sound for communication, navigation and prey detection. Acoustic sensors therefore allow the detection of marine mammals, even during polar winter months, when restricted visibility prohibits visual sightings. The animals are surrounded by a permanent natural soundscape, which, in polar waters, is mainly dominated by the movement of ice. In addition to the detection of marine mammals, acoustic long-term recordings provide information on intensity and temporal variability of characteristic natural and anthropogenic background sounds, as well as their influence on the vocalization of marine mammals

Scientific objectives: The PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean (PALAOA, Hawaiian “whale”) near Neumayer Station is intended to record the underwater soundscape in the vicinity of the shelf ice edge over the duration of several years. These long-term recordings will allow studying the acoustic repertoire of whales and seals continuously in an environment almost undisturbed by humans. The data will be analyzed to (1) register species specific vocalizations, (2) infer the approximate number of animals inside the measuring range, (3) calculate their movements relative to the observatory, and (4) examine possible effects of the sporadic shipping traffic on the acoustic and locomotive behaviour of marine mammals.

The data, which are largely free of anthropogenic noise, provide also a base to set up passive acoustic mitigation systems used on research vessels. Noise-free bioacoustic data thereby represent the foundation for the development of automatic pattern recognition procedures in the presence of interfering sounds, e.g. propeller noise.





In a nutshell, the microphone (when on) provides you with the most incredible soundscape you've ever heard (pinkfloydish in some way). I sometimes lauch it when I work at night ... it's beautiful, super calming and really worth any relaxation tape you could put your hand on

All you have to do is download the palaoa.mp3.m3u, put it somewhere on your computer and launch it when you want to listen to something so eery that it sounds out of this world

The mic is currently off but you can get an idea of how it sounds on this vid (marduk maybe ... for a little translation? ) :

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Enjoy!

[Songhai Profile]

It's live now! It is truly amazing ... just heard whales singing go listen to the sound of silence

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