Episode 31 - Earwax, Echoes and Entropy
At First Light Festival in Lowestoft, Steve dives into the sonic mysteries of the deep with Richard Sabin from the Natural History Museum and astrophysicist Chris Lintott. From whale earwax to the music of the cosmos, this episode of On the Origin of the Pieces explores how sound shapes life—from the ocean floor to the edges of the universe. Plus, supporters on Patreon get access to a rare selection of historic cetacean recordings that inspired the conversation.
Underwater Sound & Whale Earwax
A cast of whale earwax becomes a window into time: each layer a record of migration, diet and pollution. Steve and Richard discuss how marine scientists listen to the sea using hydrophones (underwater microphones), the role of AI in analysis, and how our increasingly noisy oceans affect marine life. Check out all the historic cetacean recordings discussed here.
Music, Physics & the Ear as a Time Machine
With Chris Lintott, the conversation turns to where music and physics meet—vibration, resonance and entropy—and how curiosity links science and art. They reflect on the ear as a kind of time machine: evolution’s microphone for hearing the universe.
Echoes & Entropy: A Universe of Music Performance
The episode closes with a live Universe of Music performance and monologue, drawing threads between astronomical processes and musical form. It’s a meditation on echoes and entropy: how order and chaos shape everything from stars to shells.
Support & extras: Patreon Newsletter Universe of Music
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript from the episode, reflowed for readability. No wording changes have been made.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician and performer and composer from London, and this is my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces.This is the show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways.Hello, Musically Curious people. It's lovely to be back in your ears again. Thank you for tuning back in.I know there's been a bit of a delay, lots of those this year, I'm aware, but I have now got lots of stuff already edited and ready to go. So it's been a busy summer of lots of playing and lots of touring and composition work and all sorts, but also lots and lots of editing and lots of behind the scenes work, which I'm really pleased about. I'm nearly ready to launch a new website for the show as well, which I've been working very hard on and it's looking very exciting, so I'm really pleased about that.But also, as I say, loads and loads of great guests coming up, some of whom are really quite well known and I'm really excited for you to hear, and many of whom you probably won't know, but that's just as great. I love talking to people from all different walks of musical life, as you know. By the way, if you've got anyone you want to suggest that I should talk to, I have had people suggest friends of theirs or a really great musician they saw, and it can be anyone from a busker to a music lover to someone extremely well known.As you know, I try and talk to anyone doing anything vaguely interesting with music. On which note, I really, really enjoyed my chat with brilliant music therapist, Cass, last episode. So if you haven't heard that one, do go back and have a listen.That's from back in July. But yeah, stay tuned for loads and loads more.So this episode, a little bit different today. And that is because today the episode is taken pretty much entirely from an interview that I did with a world renowned whale scientist. And that's right, whale scientist.At First Light Festival over the summer, I interviewed a man called Richard Sabin, who is the lead curator of mammals at the Natural History Museum and has a particular fascination with whales and whale earwax, as you will learn shortly. We did a session on underwater sound, so how sound works underwater, how it's transmitted, the physics of it, how we understand sound underwater as humans, but also how other animals understand sound underwater. And of course, whale song, we go into that, whether it can be considered song.So a little bit different, but hopefully you will be interested in this, as I certainly was. I talked to Richard, as I say, at First Light Festival in front of an audience of people, so the sound is a bit different from how it will be in the studio. Hope that's OK.And we do some little sonic experiments along the way, all sorts of fun stuff about underwater sound and whale song and how whales communicate and cetaceans and dolphins and things communicate underwater. So I think it's kind of important, as a musician, I found it very, very interesting to learn more about how sound works, because obviously music is sound, but thinking about the vibrations in the air that transmit sound from one place into our ears and then how we interpret that sound. And then thinking about that in relation to the natural world, how different animals do that same job, either above the water or underwater.I'm also a very, very keen scuba diver. I have, believe it or not, an occasional sideline as an underwater photographer for diving magazines and travel magazines and that kind of thing. And so we talk a little bit about that, and that's what brought me to thinking about how sound works underwater.I have some hydrophones, some underwater microphones, and as you will find out, Richard was kind enough to lend me some very, very, very rare recordings of some of the very first underwater sound recordings that were made really from a scientific point of view. And we played them up at Audio Gold, friends of the show, Audio Gold, who featured on a previous episode. So go and check that out.They have this Hi-Fi Emporium full of incredible vintage Hi-Fis. And these old recordings were on 78, so 78 RPM discs, so very, very old records from the 40s, 50s and 60s. So we needed to go somewhere where we could digitise them.So I have digitised them for the museum. They are available to curators at the museum now. And they're going to be up on the new website, which as I say is coming soon, my new website.But meanwhile, if you go to originandthepieces.com, maybe by the time you listen to this, it will be up and running. If not, it would just be a holding page on my current website, but you know, still counts. But before I talk underwater sound with Richard Sabin from the Natural History Museum, I have another scientist on the show, and that is my friend, Chris Lintott.Now Chris and I have a little tour coming up. We do a show called Universe of Music. If you go to universofmusic.co.uk, there will be soon, there isn't currently a website there, but there will be one soon about our tour dates and what the show is.We are doing a show about the interaction, I suppose, of space and music. So Chris loves music, doesn't know anything about it. I love space and don't know anything about that.So it's kind of, we kind of learn from each other and the audience learns along the way. There's lots of live music, there's lots of fascinating stuff about astronomy, there's lots of stuff about what music can teach us about astronomy and vice versa. So yeah, we're doing some lovely shows.The first of which is at Jamboree in King's Cross in London on the 10th of October. So do come along to that. That's a very special show.We're doing a funeral for the end of the universe. I'll talk a bit more about the end of the universe shortly, but Katie Mack, who wrote a book called The End of Everything is coming down to talk. She's coming over from Canada, in fact, to talk about how the universe will end in many billions of years time.But because we want to give the universe a sendoff in a kind of New Orleans style, we are doing a New Orleans style wake in the second half. So I've got musicians from the Hackney Colliery band coming down. Jamboree is a really great venue.If you don't know, I suggest you check it out. And so we're gonna have a bit of a knees up in the second half. It's a little party with some science along the way.So do come to that on the 10th of October. And then on the 20th of November, we are at Pound Arts, which is in Corsham with our Universe of Music show. 27th of November, we're at Cambridge Junction with the Universe of Music show again.And then the 25th of January, we're at Rope Tackle Art Center in Shoreham by Sea. So if you like the sound of science and music and astronomy and music and how they kind of cross over, then come to those shows. And just for a little taste of that, I thought what we would do is play a little clip of a section of Chris' Gresham College lecture.Now, Gresham College is a really great institution. It's been going for many hundreds of years and they do a free lecture series in London and online. So if you search for them, you'll find absolutely incredible wealth of lectures dating back many years.And Chris is their professor of astronomy at the moment. And he invited me to kind of play along with a little piece about the end of the universe again. So here is a little improvised piece I did on trumpet with some electronic processing, while Chris tells us about the end of the universe.Our universe is past its best. Stars die and are not replaced by new stars being born. The galaxies we see around us are fading away slowly, star by star, as each dies either as a supernova or fading to a white dwarf.Soon, the last star will shine its last light and we'll be left with a universe filled with compact remnants, white dwarfs fading to black, black holes and a casual neutron star. The amount of the universe we can see is dropping, dark energy sees to that and so each of these stellar remnants will become increasingly isolated and eventually, as proton decay comes from them all, white dwarfs will disappear, black holes of aparite neutron stars fade into nothing but a sea of radiation, expanding outwards, propelled by remorseless and endless dark energy into a sea of radiation that will last for infinity, with nothing ever happening.But in the beginning, there was great potency and little form, and thenceforth, there's been a long and fluctuating adventure towards harmonious complexity of form, and towards the awakening of the spirit into unity, knowledge, delight, and self-expression. Nowhere, and at no time, as far as we can tell, at least in this galaxy, has this adventure reached further than it has in ourselves. And in us, what's been achieved is but a minute beginning.But it is a real beginning. Humankind in our day has gained some depth of insight, some breadth of knowledge, some power of creation, some faculty of worship. We've looked far afield, and we've probed, not altogether superficially, into the nature of existence, Thank you very much.Steve Pretty.So once again, yeah, come and see us on the 10th of October in London, and then those other dates, the 20th of November in Corsham, the 27th of November in Cambridge, and the 15th of January in Shorham by Sea. So that's me and Chris Lintott, universeofmusic.co.uk. Now over to a sweltering tent in Suffolk, where I spoke to Richard Sabin back in the summer at the fabulous First Light Festival.This is Underwater Sound with Richard Sabin from the Natural History Museum. This is something that I've grown to love dearly in the past 10 years. Something that I know inextricably linked with, and something that my parents, I'm sure, would have been proud to know that I've spent the past 10 years working with. This is earwax.Believe it or not, this is earwax, and it's one of the best things in the world, I would say. It's actually earwax from the ear canal of a large fin whale. So, fin whale is the second largest species on the planet after the blue whale.And these clogs actually form inside the ear canals of filter-feeding whales. So, those whales that don't have teeth, they're animals that have got plates of baling, and they use them to filter things like fish and krill from the ocean. Inside their ear canal, the wax builds up in the same way as it does with us, but they don't have an external opening to their ear.So they form these wonderful clogs. And back in the early 19th, early 20th century, in fact, we started to collect these clogs from animals when we were examining them. But we haven't really any real appreciation of what they were for.But back in the 1950s, my predecessor at the museum made a half section through one of the plugs and realized that it's full of layers, individual layers of material, which are laid down year by year and can be used to tell the age of the animal. So this is an incredible thing. But then leap forward to 2015 and I was at a conference in the US.,a marine mammal conference, and there were two marine biologists there talking about two blue whales that had been trapped in sea ice and unfortunately had died. There was a controlled examination of their bodies and they took the plugs from the animals and they started to examine what was inside the plugs in detail for the first time. This is really quite ground breaking work.And what they realized was that these plugs are full of information about everything that the animal, the individual animal has experienced in its life. Whether it's exposure to contaminants in the ocean or whether or not the animal has been pregnant, if it's a female, stress levels, this is the key thing. Exposure to levels of stress.They were finding cortisol, which is the stress hormone, and progesterone, which is the pregnancy hormone, in earplugs just like this. And these two marine biologists said, we've worked with these two animals that have been alive for about 30 years. Wouldn't it be great if we could look back in time and see the way that things have changed for these animals?Have they been exposed to different types of stresses over the years? So I'm in the audience, and my counter part from the Smithsonian in Washington in the US was in the audience. And we stood up and said, well, actually, you know, our collections, our respective collections hold dozens of these plugs from animals that have been collected over the course of the past 150 years.And so we worked together to take plugs from our collections and put together a time series, a sequence of plugs, which created a timeline from 1870 to 2016. And it gave us the opportunity to look at changes in levels of stress in these whales. And we saw correlations with human activity in the ocean, primarily things like commercial whaling, First World War, Second World War, peaks of stress in those animals related directly to those time periods.Now, you would expect from the 1980s, stress levels to start to decrease because that was the point at which commercial whaling was banned. There was no more hunting of whales. But actually from the 1990s, what we started to see was a general increase in stress levels of cetaceans, whales, dolphins and porpoises.And we think it's related to things that weren't necessarily a problem for them a hundred years ago. And the big one is something that none of us really talk about. One of the biggest pollutants in the ocean is noise, underwater noise, and it's noise that's generated by us, by our activity.I want to come back to that, to the human aspect of it. But before we go any further, I think we should talk a little bit about how sound works in the sea or in water generally. So, obviously, sound is waves of air.So, now I want to talk to you now. I'm creating vibration in my throat, and that's coming to you, obviously, now through a microphone as well, the internal electrical energy coming to you as sound pressure waves in the air, right? And that's how your ears convert those pressure waves into my understanding of what I'm saying, or into understanding music.Well, it works similarly, but in a slightly different way in water, right? So it's water isn't compressible in the same way, right? It's not the same compressibility.So sound travels very differently in water. Yeah. Yeah.I mean, sound, we understand travels much more effectively through water than through air. I mean, I think the statistic that's given is it's six times more efficient sound passing through water than it is through air. And this is a real issue, of course, because basically every organism that lives in the ocean relies on sound to a greater or lesser degree.And with whales and dolphins, particularly if we focus on the larger whales, they're using sound to find each other. They're using sound to find their food. They're using sound to read the landscape, the underwater landscape.And all of these things are being disrupted by the contaminants, the sound pollution that we're putting into the ocean.But it also travels faster as well. So again, coming back to the physics for a second, so in air it travels, I'm really not going to know if it's about 340 meters a second of the in air. But in water it's like four and a half times that, 1,500 times.So that partly, as you say, it's more efficient, so it allows it to travel fast, much faster than in air and also much further distances.Yeah, this is the thing that we're talking about when large whales are actually communicating with each other. It's across thousands of kilometers through the ocean. And of course, in the days before there was the kind of sound contamination that we're creating now, it was relatively straightforward, I would say comparatively straightforward for them to hear each other on either side of the Atlantic or across the Pacific.Now it's becoming more of an issue.One of the things you said to me early on was that sound is the kind of sense that these animals use more than anything and it's sound is the kind of sensory medium of the sea, much more than light, because light is absorbed so quickly. Yeah. You can see where the sound is transmitted so efficiently.Yeah.This is the incredible thing. You think about whales and dolphins, they are animals that we take for granted in the ocean. You know, we're familiar with the way that they look, with the way that they behave.But 50 million years ago, they were living on land. Their ancestors were living quite happily on land, but something happened, something changed and progressively, their ancestors moved into the ocean. Within about 8 million years, they have become completely dependent on life in the ocean.Their bodies have changed, the way that they use their vision and their hearing had also changed. But across the millions of years since then, they've become incredibly well adapted, not just to living in an ocean that has incredible pressures and to us is a really fabulously hostile place, but sound has become the main medium for communication and they rely on it, their lives depend on it. Hearing is an interesting thing with whales and dolphins.They produce sound in different ways. So with the great whales, the huge whales, like the blue whales, humpback whales, they are using relatively low frequencies, I think below 20 kilohertz roughly.20 kilohertz is the limit of human hearing, it's the highest we can hear. 20 kilohertz is the lowest we can hear.So I think it's between 7 hertz to about 20 kilohertz, to my understanding. With the toothed cetaceans, the dolphins, the porpoises, things like sperm whales and bleak whales, they have an incredible hearing range. This is primarily because they are using echolocation.They're using echolocation to make sense of their world. They're reading the landscape, if you like, underwater and they're finding their food. One of the remarkable things about the toothed whales and dolphins is they go into, particularly things like sperm whales and bleak whales, they go down two kilometers in depth, complete darkness, and they're using echolocation.This is a focused beam of sound. They produce clicks and it's focused through this sort of fatty material that they have in their forehead into a beam. And they move their head from side to side and it's almost like a torch beam of sound.And anything that's in the environment close by to them gets touched by these sound waves. The sound waves are reflected back and an image is created in the brain of the animal so we can see what kind of a prey it's dealing with. Now this is all done in complete darkness under incredible water pressure, atmospheric pressure, and they have to also control the amount of oxygen that they have in their body and make sure that they've got enough to get back to the surface of the ocean again.So it's a wonderful series of adaptations.Incredible, incredible thing for an animal to be able to do.It is and the remarkable thing is that if you're talking about a pod of say three or four sperm whales, if one of them is echolocating, when the same wave is bent back of whatever it is they're looking at, all of them receive the image. You told me this when we first chatted and I found that really evocative, that idea that it's sort of a group broadcast. It's almost like, you know, so one animal transmits the clicks and then all of the animals in the pod receive the echo back. So it's an amazing way of communicating into a group, so one, yeah, broadcasting and receiving.Yeah, it's fantastic. The thing that the toothed whales and dolphins receive the sand through their lower jaw. The lower jaw is actually hollow and it's filled with a jelly-like material that helps to refine the sand and direct it straight into the ear canal.With the great whales, the blue whales, the fin whales, they're using low-frequency sand to communicate with each other. It's much more about finding your mates, if you like. They're relatively solitary animals.So come the time when they need to find each other, they start to make these songs, these calls. And it's particularly famous. It's been studied an awful lot with the humpback whale.It's called cultural transmission. So it's very similar to the way that we teach our young. Humans teach their young.You have a pattern of learning, a pattern of behavior, that becomes very specific to a particular group, to a particular culture. And you pass on that knowledge to the next generation through observation. And that's exactly what's happening with these whales songs.This is one of the things that we think is happening. There's cultural transmission. There's a lot of information about who's in the pod, who's where, where's good to go to eat, and more than that, trying to find each other, and more than that.The likelihood is that there's a complex language that's actually encoded in those songs, and it's only now just starting to be examined. There's a brilliant study that's being done by the University of Edinburgh, published a few weeks ago, that's talking about similarities in the structure of certain types of whale song and human language.Wow. So this is something that fascinates me because, so the podcast is called On The Origin of the Pieces, as a sort of play on the, you know, Darwinian On The Origin of the Pieces. So I'm interested in the origins of music, why music's there.And there's a lot of, there's a lot of contention about why music's there. We don't really know why music exists in humans, you know. Some people, there's the Steven Pinker argument, which is that it's auditory cheesecake, so it's sort of evolved in parallel with language, and it was just a sort of nice thing to have, but not that important.And then there's the other argument, which is that it's absolutely central and almost sort of pre-linguistic. It's language emerged from music, not the other way around. Obviously, I prefer that explanation.But I find that really, really interesting, the kind of links between music and language and the different ways that they interact in humans. So with that in mind, when we're talking about citations in Wales, is it, how true is it to say, this is Wales song, Wales are singing in the way that... I mean, of course, we can never truly know that perhaps, but in what ways do we think of it as musical in the way that we think of it for humans?I think if you take it as a kind of a performance, then there's more weight to it. You know, there's one theory that the males, the male hombacks are actually singing to basically show off to females. And we all like to show off.You're talking about a rock musician basically. Yeah, that's classic rock and roll. Front man, isn't it?That's right. And at the same time, there's no real evidence to suggest that it makes a huge difference. But it's one of the best ways that we can actually showcase our presence.You know, the full range of our vocal ability may actually give some indication of the fitness of the individual who's actually making the song.And again, I think that this argument is that that is the same thing for humans, you know, that music, again, it's partly a... And the adaptive reason for it is to show your kind of, you know, your good genes that you've got. You're able to do something as frivolous as music and then to sort of show off to people.And sort of assert your dominance, too. And maybe mark territory, which is a bit like a Friday night acting, though, or something.Yeah, you know what he was saying last night. You don't know what we mean. So we had this amazing meeting a few weeks ago, and you showed me some incredible specimens.And one of the things you did was to lend me some of these recordings.So there's a series of vinyl discs which were created in the 1950s and 60s, primarily by the US military and some scientific institutions in the US. And it was the first attempt for them to use recording devices in the ocean to capture the sounds of things like belugas and dolphins and humpback whales and a whole range of different species. Of course, there was an interest in how these animals were able to communicate with each other across such large distances and potentially how those data could be used or how that science could be developed to aid with military communication.So of course, there was always a military animal. But it was kind of the early days of recording underwater sound. We realize now that an awful lot of the equipment that they were using was quite rudimentary.So you need direction of microphones. You need to be able to listen to the very, very quiet sounds because there's a lot going on that's actually outside of the range of human hearing. But nonetheless, we had the great good fortune to go to a wonderful place in North London called Audio Gold, a contact of yours I think.We had an afternoon where we played these discs. And we listened to them and we also listened to the commentary that was given by quotable notable scientists of the time. Very flat, very droll, no humor at all.Absolutely comedic almost, I think, in some senses.It was amazing. It was an amazing afternoon. We had this incredible afternoon together listening on, because it's this beautiful sort of vintage hi-fi emporium.So all of these hi-fi nerds and real music people will come in to maybe think about spending 10 grand on some posh speakers. And they're very kindly, they spent the entire afternoon playing vintage whale song recordings through a 60,000 pound hi-fi, which is amazing. So these old 78 discs.And it was really, really interesting to hear them. And actually, I've got, I digitized them for the museum. And I've got a recording of it now.I just thought we might play a little bit of it now, so you can hear how it is. I hope this one comes through right. These old 78, so very, very scratchy from the 40s and 50s.Animal sounds in the sea. The many familiar sounds in nature, from the buzzing of insects to the roar of the lion, come to our ears through the medium of the air. Our ears are well adapted to hearing these airborne sounds, but poorly adapted to underwater hearing.It is therefore not surprising that we once believed the sea to be a world of profound silence. With the development of the hydrophone, we have now come to realize that the sea is far from silent. The waters on some coastal areas are perpetually noisy, while others are intermittently or seasonally filled with strange and weird sounds, no less fascinating than the calls in a tropical jungle.For comparison, we will first give a recording of normal water noise with some chip sounds.I'm just going to play a video a bit later for the...The following, however, is an actual recording of sounds produced by a marine animal underwater.Can I just take a moment to say thank you to Kate for translating Whale Song.Absolutely loved it. I've never seen that before. Have you ever done it before?I've never done it before. Blackbirds are not so fun.Blackbirds, okay. So we spent the whole afternoon listening to this stuff. I don't think they sold a single hi-fi that day, but we had them every time.And it's really fascinating to hear that history of how we've started. Again, the idea that the sea is silent is something that persists for a long time in human history. And as someone who does a lot of scuba diving, I know that it's not at all.The minute you go underwater, if you open your ears to things, which is the kind of purpose of my podcast, is to try and help people to open their ears, to help you understand music in new ways and understand sound in new ways, I suppose. If you kind of open your ears and tune in to what's going around you, you can really hear a lot of things. Obviously, if you're in an area with stations, you can sometimes hear dolphin clicks and whistles and pops.And whale song, of course, if you're in an area with whales. But even just the fish biting, nibbling the coral, the shrimp, it's full of sonic kind of possibilities.A really noisy place. And actually, there have been some incredible studies that have been conducted over the years. One of the ones I'm familiar with first hand is the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust.They send out a vessel every year and they sail around the Hebrides, a beautiful part of the world. And they deploy these hydrophones, these listening and recording devices in the water. And they do these same transects every single year.And it's been going on for decades now, collecting really important information. Now, there's technology that's been developed that helps them to identify the sounds that they're hearing. And of course, if you can identify the noises that these organisms in the ocean are making, you can do a census effectively.What species are present? What species were present 30 years ago? Has the profile changed today?So really important to collect that information.I find it endlessly fascinating how technology, both in science and in music, technology really drives forward progress. It's sort of more obvious in science when a new piece of kick can help you to understand things in a new way. But I've always made the argument that the same is true in music.So one of the things you've seen me performing this weekend, you may have seen me play some conch shells. I've become a bit obsessed with playing seashells. One of the reasons for that is because it's one of the earliest musical instruments, very simple musical instrument in lots of ways.You play it like a trumpet. I've also got a 3D printed conch shell. I like to trace the history, the origin of music, the evolution of music, from this very primitive instrument, right to the 3D printed conch shell, which still produces the same sound, but is, I would say, probably the most technologically advanced instrument I have in my studio for the synthesizers and everything else.Because they would have had to laser scan in, and all the rest of it to make this thing. I like to think of all of the rest of musical history taking place in the middle of that. I think it's a bit the same with science.I just find it so interesting how you can keep zooming either in or out depending on your perspective. A new piece of technology where in music it might be being able to use metal to construct a trumpet. In science, it's in this case the development of a hydrophone.Suddenly, it opens up all these new perspectives. That's something that I find really inspiring. There's a lot of bleeding over from technological innovation in music and in science, I think.Yeah, I think it's true when we think about the ocean. I mean, we were listening to the sound of those words from that wonderful performer talking about the sounds of the ocean. That was in the 1960s.The Challenger expedition, HMS Challenger, was the first sort of oceanographic voyage of its time back in the 19th century, so, you know, a hundred years before that recording was made. And that was really to… one of the things that I wanted to do was try and test the theory that there was life in the ocean below the part of the ocean where light penetrates.So in the deep ocean, there was a general kind of understanding or a misconception that there was nothing then. So one of the things that the Challenger Expedition did when it went down into the Southern Hemisphere was take incredible lengths of rope, hemp rope, miles and miles of rope, which they put into the ocean to do trawls. And they brought, you can imagine, they brought all kinds of things to the surface, which are now in the Natural History Museum in London.So it's a process of discovery, exploration, understanding, understanding that there is life in every part of the ocean, no matter how dark, no matter how deep. And of course, there will be associated sounds. Yes.And then, you know, exploring with technology in the 20th century, what those sounds are from which species. And of course, now we're in the 21st century, and we're approaching the sort of the pinch point with how far are we going to allow ourselves to go with AI?Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a conversation about whether AI might be used to try and translate Wales on, essentially. And this is quite controversial in your world.Yeah, yeah. I think from the point of view, those of you that are familiar with the work of people like Diane Fossey, who worked with gorillas, mountain gorillas, and Jane Goodall, who's worked with chimpanzees, and all of the great researchers over the years who've worked in different parts of the world, looking at different groups of animals, but particularly with primates. Observation, understanding, listening to the way that they communicate with each other, gaining an idea of the kind of the general principles of communication and how their societies are structured.The same principles have been applied to parts of the ocean. And there is one study that I can cite, which has been taking place off Florida for 40 years now. And there's a researcher, a wonderful researcher, called Denise Herzing.She's been working with spotted dolphins, the same groups, the same communities effectively. And she's become familiar to them, and they've become familiar to her. So like Jane Goodall, like Diane Fosse, she's accepted by the animals they were studying to a greater or lesser degree, and with respect.But of course, that comes from that study. What are these clicks and whistles and sounds and songs that these animals are making to each other underneath the ocean? And is there more complexity in there?Well, we know that there is complexity, but how far should we go? Why should we break into the language system of a species, a non-human species? And if we do, what do we do with that information?But also the temptation to try and talk back is going to be pretty overwhelming.Yeah, I think this is the risk. And no disrespect to any of the researchers who have done incredible work over the decades, but there will always be commercial interests in the development of these kinds of technologies. And we have to be careful if we are able to break into these language systems about what we say to these non-human species, about who we are and what we'd like them to do.So interesting, yeah, I don't know, it's very interesting. I just wanted to just, so we talked a little bit there, we sort of touched on this thing about, I suppose, finding the signal from the noise in some of this, especially with the early hydrophones. And I just wanted to think about that from a point of view of a musician, I suppose, someone really interested in sound.And that is, so the classic case in point is the sea, the sound of the sea, so crashing waves. That generates a kind of white noise, or pink noise, sometimes a different type of noise, which is essentially all of the frequencies that we can hear, because it's such a complex thing, all of the water interacting, and the sand and the rocks and everything. And it creates this white noise.And that basically means that it's got all of the frequencies we can hear within it. And what that means is that, obviously it means, that's why people have white noise machines, right? So that you can kind of make drums out.Are you a white noise machine user?Not white noise machines, but vacuum cleaners and washing machines.Oh, yes, I'm a user.Yeah. I was, as a child, soothed by the sound of a vacuum cleaner and sent to sleep by the sound of a washing machine, according to my parents.But what's interesting is, when you've got that wide frequency band, you can tune, you can basically find any note from that. So from a musical point of view, you can kind of strip out everything else and just hone into one thing. Hello, it's Steve back in the studio here.I'm just briefly interrupting this interview with Richard to highlight and to sort of demonstrate what I'm talking about there. When I'm talking about this white noise, when you've got a lot of frequencies piled on top of one another, like you do with the sound of the sea or Richard's sound of the vacuum cleaner or washing machine or whatever it is. What you then have is all of these frequencies that you can dial into very, very specifically.So let me show you what I mean. So if you're watching along, don't forget you can watch this on Spotify or on YouTube. You can see here that I have got some music software open and I've got a recording that I took of some waves.So you can hear the waves crashing here. It's like that. So you can hear very complicated, they sound like waves to us because we're kind of associating them with that, but really it's actually weirdly similar to the sound of a vacuum cleaner that's a bit more constant or a washing machine.If you just take a little snippet of that, it would be that same sound. There's a bit more movement in this, but what we can then do is we can filter out everything apart from a very specific bit of the sound. So if I do that now with a filter, you can hear this is dropping out all of the frequencies apart from something that we're really zeroing in on.Right. And then we can move that around, move that frequency around. Right, so all of these frequencies that you're hearing are within the sound of those waves, right?Right the way down, if you're listening on headphones, you might be able to hear very low. That's down to the very, very limits, bottom limits of human hearing around 20 hertz, 50 hertz. So cycles a second, waveforms a second.And then as we go up, right up to the very, very piercing top end, which is 20 kilohertz, so 20,000 hertz, so that's that cycle there. And in fact, we can even, if I take that one off, we can even play the C like a scale. So if I turn up this, right, what I've got now is I'm able to, with the keyboard here, play the C like a scale by moving that filter.Again, if you're watching online, you can see that moving around, and hopefully you can hear that if you're just listening on headphones, but do pop over to check out the visuals as well. And why don't we play a little tune on this? So again, this is just zeroing in on frequencies within the sound of the C.So here's the sound of the C again. And you can hear it's still there. That's still in there. I'm just focusing on that as we go through. So there's no other sound playing at all other than the sound of the C. So for example, I could play.Somewhere beyond the sea. And that is playing the actual sea, the actual waves.So there we are, bit of fun with tuning into the sea by tuning out all of the other frequencies. So the signal from the noise. Now back to Richard and myself in a sweltering tent in the summer to talk about hydrophones.Here we go. I have a hydrophone, which I like to drop into the water, any opportunity. Now what I thought might be interesting to try was to hear a piece of music, a project called Ocean Songs.And we did a tune, which I felt appropriate for this, called Sing The Whale, which we wrote for this project. So I'm just going to play it to you through. This is a waterproof speaker.This is me doing my best whale song impression on a trumpet. How's it ready?That's pretty good.That's pretty good.Thank you. There we go. We're the experts.Take that.So that's two. And I'm going to leave that plate. I'm just going to see again, a bit of an experiment.Let's see what happens. If we can put this in here and see how it changes.So, it's really interesting. What I noticed from doing that, when it's very shallow, it's a very different tone from when it goes deeper. Now obviously here we're only talking about a few centimeters.But over enormous depths, the physics of the sound really changes everything. And the thing I noticed as a musician is the first thing to go really is the top end. So here's that recording again.And if I am... The many familiar sounds in nature in the buzzing of insects, to the roar of the lion, comes from our ears, the medium of the air. Our ears are well adapted to hearing the air roaring sound.So, it's already starting to sound a bit more like, if you're listening underwater, for those of you who've been swimming and heard stuff above the water, you might, that might sound familiar. And then it gets deeper and deeper. And so presumably, this is why, this is partly why the way of having such a range of communication.Right, yeah, it would make sense. And the other thing that we need to remember too is the nature of the landscape, if you like, or if the ocean bottom makes a difference too. So I think sound is altered by the temperature of the water.And of course, the water pressure itself. But there are situations that we know occur where there are deep diving, deep whales. These are animals which go down two, three kilometers depth that are exposed to naval sonar.And this is the kind of sonar that's used by different countries to detect the presence of submarines and gosh knows what else. But there are sounds that can be generated by those ships that can actually, if a big whale is feeling at the bottom of an ocean trench, that sound can actually become much more concentrated and much more alarming to the animal because of the proximity of the animal to the ocean floor.Because it's reflecting back.Reflecting back, exactly that. And in those instances, there are proven examples that it causes the whale is feeding to surface too quickly. And then, of course, there's an issue with something that they suffer from, which is very similar to the bending human divers.Wow. Wow. And again, you touched there on the kind of complexity of the sonic landscape of the water and the fact that we're changing it as well.But I think, we talked about how again that frequency rolls off, but it's so complicated with the different salinity, the different temperature, the different, so I think it must be, I just find it very interesting when I am underwater and the fact that it's not directional. I remember once, very sadly actually, we were diving in Indonesia and we heard some what sounded like explosions while we were underwater. And we just didn't know what was going on.And we thought, there's been some sort of terrorist attack above the land. What's going on? And it was people dynamite fishing.So just chucking sticks of dynamite in, seeing what was floating, something more awful. But what was interesting about that is we had no idea which direction it's coming from. You know, it could have been coming from over there, it could have been five miles away, it could have been a few hundred meters away.Because it's very disorienting if you're not used to that world.I remember having a conversation with one of the camera crew that was working on one of the Attenborough shows a number of years ago. And he was talking about, I think they were filming off the Azores. Now there are pilot whales and sperm whales that you can see in quite large numbers off the Azores at certain times of the year.And they were in the ocean with their camera equipment and it was fairly dark, the water was fairly murky. They couldn't see the sperm whales, but they knew they were somewhere around. And there was one solitary cameraman, he had his equipment ready and he said he suddenly felt like he was being tapped on the chest, just very gently tapped on the chest.And this tapping felt more and more intense and became like a slapping and then felt like a punching on the chest. And what was actually happening, he was being read by the echolocation of a sperm whale. And that whale was reading him inside and out and basically figuring out whether or not he was worth eating and he wasn't because we're not, basically we're not.But he said that he had no idea which direction the sound was coming from and imagine you are prey for that whale. You understand that you're being read but you've got no idea where it's coming from.But even when I've been diving and there's been dolphins or whales in the waters and you can hear some, I mean I have dived with whales but in the times when we've been in an area with whales but not seen any, we've come up and said, oh, we can hear the whale and the skipper with the boat is like, they're probably about 10 miles away. So because again, the way it travels is, but then other times they can be so silent, they can move. The time we did encounter a whale we weren't expecting to was in Oman and it just didn't pass us without any sound at all.This is one of the things that of course we have to appreciate is that they are creditors and they will use their ability to generate sound differently. So with orcas, we know that orcas have incredibly different behaviors in different parts of the ocean, culturally different behaviors. And we know that certain parts of orcas will be completely silent when they're hunting fish, because fish have got excellent hearing.So they are very, very silent. They'll do all of the communication about what they want to do with the fish a distance away, so as not to let the fish know what's going on. And then when they get to the fish, they do everything in a coordinated but silent fashion.Wow.Yeah.That's incredible. I'm gonna try to emulate going down to depth just by making some adjustments here.And you come to our view.So the first thing you get is to try and roll off at that top end.So that already feels like we're starting to go underwater. Now, then I have a, so that's a bit too much there. That kind of gives that sense of washing out, I'm not quite sure where you are, it's my idea.And then because as you ascend and descend, and you know the topography of the landscape can change, and it can sometimes you get this thing in, for us audio folk called phasing or comb filtering. Essentially, if you imagine here's the waveform, what you do is because of the interacting waves, and it will kind of notch through, and it sounds, it almost sounds metallic when that happens. And I've experienced that quite a lot underwater.And so I've kind of got that. Can we get this?What do you think, how close have I got?It sounds pretty good to me.Oh, yeah, I'll take that. It's just an interesting term, the term and what it is that makes the sound feel so different to a human underwater, as well as thinking about how the animals approach it. And so I was just thinking, okay, so we're losing the top end, but we're also losing the sense of being at a place where it is.Yes, yeah. But also there's this sort of slight waviness, ironically this sort of unsettling, unbalanced nature of it going up and down and being a bit...To be honest with you, as you were processing that, I started to feel more and more anxious, not because I wasn't prepared to give you an opinion on how well you're doing, but it's made me feel kind of anxious because there wasn't an ability to sort of pinpoint.Yeah.We're so, as you say, we're so queued in, we're so used to having a directional aspect to the way that we hear things. And that just had no sense.You can't tell where it's coming from, suddenly kind of it is everywhere. But what's so interesting about that is that that's exactly the opposite thing that the whales have, right? They have absolutely incredible abilities to pinpoint things.So, but using the same landscape, they can develop this ability to.Yeah. It's a form of evolutionary adaptation, which is unique to whales and dolphins, but that's not to say that they're, of course, the only species that use sound and water. It's just used in incredibly different ways.Well, of course, bats and other animals use it on land as well. I just want to ask you one question, and it's a question I ask all of the people I have as guests on my podcast. That question is, what's the point of music?What is the point of music? Music is escapism. It's a way of altering, I think, the way that your brain is dealing with stress.I think it's a way of remembering things. Music is incredibly evocative. It holds a lot of information about, you know, you hear something that means a lot to you at some point in your past, and you hear it again in the present, and it brings all of those memories, you know, crashing back.And I think there is an evolutionary reason for that, or what that might be, I'm not sure. But you know, it's one of the most evocative things, I think. You hear a piece of music from when you're in your teens, and it was important to you then.And if it was a good piece of music, it still means something to you. You almost relink the experience of the first song that you heard.Yeah, yeah. And you're a big music fan yourself.I am. Yeah, yeah. Big electronic music fan.Yeah, yeah. And I suppose one question I have is, what can we take positively going forward as people who are interested and concerned about this? What can we do?Because we have some agency over, we can try and stop using plastics so much, et cetera. But what can we do with the Sonic world?It's a really tricky one because a lot of the sound that's been generated has been generated by big companies. The cargo that is being brought to different countries in the world by the sea. Well, I think maybe think about what you're purchasing when you're clicking on the thing that you want to buy in Amazon, although other companies are available.Is it something that could be produced in the UK? Is it something that could be acquired locally? Think about, you know, the carbon footprint, but also the sonic footprint that's created by clicking on something that's made in China, that's made in the USA.Be mindful of that. There is a lot of work that's been done. This isn't a completely hopeless situation.This is something that's good research work, but particularly in the US has been ongoing for years now. Scientists are actually focusing their attention on the effects of sand in the ocean, and they're making recommendations to industry. So there is work that's being done.Oh, well, that's a positive note to end on, I think. Huge thanks to Richard. Have you got anything to plug yourself?Plugs.Here, plugs. There we go. Let's take you out for that one.Yeah, huge thanks to Richard. Thanks again to Kate as well for what you've done.My thanks once again to the brilliant Richard Sabin from the Natural History Museum and of course the First Light Festival for suggesting that we talk about this in the first place and having the audience there was really interesting. We got some great questions. The whole interview, by the way, is available on my Patreon. The entire show, it's about an hour. There's some really good questions in there. There's a few other bits and bobs that I couldn't include on the show.But if you go to my Patreon, again, you can find it through originofthepieces.com. And yeah, you can kind of sign up either for free or for one pound, five pounds a month, or as much as you'd like to pay. And that helps keep the show going.But it also gives you loads of extra bits and bobs along the way, including that full interview with Richard. So thanks once again to Richard, and of course to Audio Gold for letting us take over their shop and spend the entire afternoon listening to Whale Song through ludicrously expensive and beautiful hi-fis. And thank you again to Chris Lintott.Once again, we're at Jamboree on the 10th of October, and then those other dates are mentioned later in the autumn and winter. Yeah, I think that's about it. Thank you so much for listening.You know, the usual thing, please spread the word. It really, really helps. Loads of cool stuff coming up.And I will now be more regular again. I've got, as I say, lots of edits done. So I think the next episode is pretty much already in the bag.So I will this time definitely see you in two weeks time. Meanwhile, thanks so much for listening. A theme song is by Angelique Kidjo, me and Hackney Colliery band.Slay Music and Curious. I will see you in a couple of weeks. And it will be a couple of weeks this time.Bye.