Exploring the Depths of Acoustic Ecology

Armed with hydrophones and an environmentalist’s resolve, Jana Winderen steps out onto floating docks at the widest point of the Spree River. Extending a boom out over the murky water, she slowly lowers her ultrasonic microphone and listens. The Norwegian sound artist has just arrived in Berlin to prepare for her debut in the Reethaus as part of the “Transmissions” series curated by the renowned sonic arts duo Soundwalk Collective. “Every natural space has its own presence and acoustics,” insists Winderen. What about the Spree?

The answer, in low tones and bubbling noises, washes over an intimate audience the following evening in the inner room of the Reethaus. Interspersing Spree recordings with those from dozens of other rivers in her archive, Winderen crafts an underwater musical journey on the in-built spatial sound system, taking listeners from mountains and glaciers out to the sea.

At the core of Winderen’s practice is the simple yet largely unheard proposition that underwater soundscapes are not only beautiful, but useful barometers of environmental health. Weaving together field recordings from waterways around the globe, Winderen’s sound art transcends the boundaries of conventional music, taking humans beneath the surface to expose some of nature’s most enigmatic sounds. Critically, her proposition is backed by a growing scientific field called acoustic ecology, a discipline that studies the relationship between living organisms and their sonic environment.

The roots of the burgeoning field can be traced back to R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian polymath whose life-long commitment to studying and celebrating sound in all its environmental forms birthed the now-common concept of “soundscapes”. Bringing together a multidisciplinary team spanning science, public policy and the arts, Schafer founded the “World Soundscape Project” in 1965 at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. The nascent institute focused public attention on the detrimental effects of manmade noise, collecting data to track rising noise pollution in cities. Later, Schafer turned to creative outlets to express his concerns: he composed experimental orchestral pieces recreating natural soundscapes under threat and published influential texts like “The Tuning of the World,” a poetic narration of world history through its soundscapes. “The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time, without a beginning and presumably without an ending,” mused Schafer in a biopic a few years before his 2021 death.

While the concerns with urban noise pollution brought to light by the World Soundscape Project have translated into public protest and policy globally over the last half-century, only recently is there broader interest in studying what nature’s own symphony can teach us about ecology. Back in 2006, Winderen, an avid outdoorswoman, began her own inquiry into bioacoustics close to home with Folgefonna, Norway’s third largest glacier. “I started recording up on the glacier itself, and then followed the meltwater down the river and out to the fjord,” she recalled. Winderen’s holistic approach to listening to an environment also engages with local experts she meets along the way. “I started to hear this knocking sound in my recordings, so I spoke with the local fishermen there. They explained there were haddock beds there. I could hear them!’”

While the artistic outcome of her river research takes musical form, Winderen’s recording practice also has immediate scientific value. For example, in 2009, she teamed up with freshwater biologists to record the Coquet River in Northumberland, England. Rather than fish, the team listened for insect noise as the measure of ecological health.

As the field of acoustic ecology has blossomed, research has revealed that underwater noise levels are not only a useful metric for biological health, but a catalyst of it. In 2021, Winderen partnered with a group of scientists led by marine ecologist Carlos M. Duarte to publish “The soundscape of the Anthropocene Ocean” in Science, a highly respected journal. The article outlined the threat increasingly noise levels pose to underwater ecosystems: “Shipping, resource exploration, and infrastructure development have increased the anthrophony (sounds generated by human activities), whereas the biophony (sounds of biological origin) has been reduced by hunting, fishing, and habitat degradation.”

As Winderen’s recordings beautifully capture, there is a mesmerizing world of clicks, chirps, and whistles underwater that reveal the intricate communication systems of marine life. Anthrophonic noise disturbs the signals. For example, one study by Simpson et al. shows how shipping noise makes it more difficult for fish to avoid predators, analyzing the strike–success rate and metabolic rates of predator and prey fish in different acoustic environments.

“Just to get a little bit of something like oil, we ruin massive, massive areas of the ocean,” laments Winderen. To combat this unseen challenge, her scientist collaborators have laid out wonky solutions like integrating anthropogenic noise into environmental impact assessments. Winderen, however, performs quiet activism though her art. Forged from hundreds of recordings taken across two decades, her music educates audiences by revealing cacophonous worlds they never knew existed.

Though she has great respect for the science behind acoustic ecology, Winderen finds value in listening beyond the data. “Are you actually interpreting what you hear and not just looking at the spectrogram?” she asks rhetorically. It’s a type of listening that she says is often practiced by traditional communities. Much as the fisherman in Norway had “embodied knowledge” about the aquatic life of their fjord after a lifetime trawling its surface, indigenous people around the globe often know the subtle ecological flows of their local waterways better than some visiting scientist.

One such striking example is a fish listening practice called Dulam practiced in the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea. Masters of the ancient, now-endangered skill drift underwater, arms outstretched, feeling for slight vibrations and the sounds of fish movement. When they locate a school, they signal to net-bearing compatriots who swoop in for the catch. As a part of her slow research practice, in which she embeds within the human and non-human substance of a place, Winderen tried out Dulam. “I was working on a piece for the Thailand Biennale, and I came across this fisherman who was an activist against this local coal mining project,” she said. “We met on Skype, and then he invited me to visit because we realized we are both listening to fish! He said, ‘Come along, we can compare techniques’”.

Winderen, however, is not in the business of catching fish. She even finds eating them difficult, given her close relationship. Instead, she’s a skilled musical producer, heavily processing her field recordings to make the sounds audible and enjoyable to human ears. “I cut out all the high frequencies; I lower the reverb; I slow it down; I spread it out. I do loads of composition work,” she said. There are artistic choices made both in the editing process and out in nature – Where should she drop her hydrophones? How deep? Each decision shapes the sonic fabric out of which Winderen weaves a story. She even applies dramaturgy to the disparate noises, as in one recent piece recorded after an extensive conversation with an aging fisherman. “I imagined the fisherman and I were underwater in a submarine, and he was pointing out to these different places along the seabed until we reached the continental shelf.”

Reflecting on her Reethaus performance, Winderen underscores that her work in Berlin is unfinished: “To start to say something about a water ecosystem takes time: you need to come back again and again to listen and to talk to local people to understand more about the history.” In compelling ways, the Reethaus and its waterfront are perfect case studies in acoustic ecology. The natural riverside once housed a Weimar-era public bathing facility next to a hydro-coal power plant in heavily industrial eastern Berlin. In the mid-20^th Century, increasing pollution rendered swimming in the river unsafe. But now, as environmental remediation and neighborhood change clean up the waterway, it is possible to listen for signs of the Spree’s renewed health thanks to pioneers like Winderen. Were those whispers of a more biodiverse future sounding from the river’s depths in her field recordings? At once scientific and poetic, her quest to sonically express what lies below the surface reverberates above it too – if we take the time to listen.