Sound travels at 1,500 metres per second in water—that’s five times faster than air, and they decay at just one seventh the rate. We practically live in a silent film and have the audacity to think the ocean is quiet.

‍—It’s like listening to the unknown, Dave said in our last encounter. —What constitutes the unknown? I’ve been asking myself since then. Later that day, my friend Laura gifted me with a recent book about whale sounds and frequencies. Whales produce sound up to 10s of kHz, so humans can only hear a small spectrum of whale-song. —The ocean is not silent, that’s an old myth, repeats Dave. —There’s no such thing as silence, John Cage recalled in 1952 meaning that there’s always waves, sounds, frequencies. —The sound of Whitechapel Road is quite loud, it will leak into the sounds of the ocean, we noticed, while understanding the context of our location in relation to the remoteness of the sea.

“Listening to the unknown” was developed by capturing sounds by various acousticians around the world, from diving with weights to floating with buoys, hanging off the side of boats with engines turned off. Dave captured sounds in the Scottish Hebrides and live streamed from the corals in Sharm El Sheikh using a cabled hydrophone though a live streaming mobile website on 4G.

This work was created by Dave in collaboration with several people (Nathan Goddard, Oliver Stoole, Steve Simpson, Mary Shodipo, Cathy Hobbs, Clemency White and Sara Keen) doing different things (capturing sounds, technical production, machine learning, soundscape design) and different institutions (Aqoustics, Miami University, Bristol University and Earth Species Project).

You’re invited to immerse yourself into this space, pay attention, observe, interpret and approach in a new way the depths of the ocean—and the depths of the noisy unknown.