An immersive dive into the acoustic world of whales — making the ocean's hidden soundscape audible, tangible, and worth protecting.
OCEAN EARS places whale song at the centre of an underwater orchestra — the geophony of earthquakes, storms and waves, the biophony of marine life, and the anthropophony of human-made noise. Rendered in hyperreal, spatial detail, these sounds let people sense the reality whales actually live in.
Drawing on more than two decades of continuous hydrophone recordings and the work of marine bioacousticians, the project transforms specialist scientific data into a sonic archive — one you can listen to, not just look at.
At heart, it is an argument for listening. Rising levels of human-made noise now threaten the acoustic conditions marine life depends on. To protect that world, we first have to be able to hear it.
An intelligent, geo-tagged library of marine sound — organised by species, place, time and call type, carefully attributed, and built for science, conservation and listening.
The archive depends on the recordings and expertise of the whale and ocean bioacoustics communities. Contributors keep their credit, set the terms of use, and remain part of how their sound is shared.
Contributions are governed by a memorandum of understanding, tailored to each contributor's conditions. The commitments below are the project's standing principles; specific scope, attribution format and any embargo are agreed with each contributor before any data changes hands.
Attribution is permanent and machine-safe. The person or body who made a recording is credited at every stage. Credit is bound to the audio through file-naming conventions and embedded metadata, and is preserved through machine processing — automated sorting, classification and machine-learning steps operate on stems that retain their provenance, so a recording can always be traced back to its source.
Originals are never altered. Each contributed master is checksummed on receipt and kept unmodified. All segmentation, enhancement and analysis is performed on derivative copies; the original remains intact and retrievable.
Every edit is declared. Each sound carries a complete metadata record — including latitude and longitude, recording equipment, the recordist and their purpose, and species. Any post-production or audio-repair applied by the project is logged in that record, so an edited file is never mistaken for a raw one and the scientific chain of custody stays transparent.
Not-for-profit, defined use. Recordings are used for research, conservation and listening — never sold or licensed for commercial profit. Contributors set the terms of access, may set embargoes until their own work is published, and retain the right to correct attribution.
Detailed terms and MoU templates will be published here.
A browser-based listening map. Swim through 3D soundscapes, turn your head toward a singing whale, move closer, and hear the ocean change across seasons and years.
Physical spaces where whale song is felt as well as heard — infrasound below the threshold of hearing, delivered through the body as vibration.
Practice-led researcher in spatial and infrasound listening. Designs the archive, analysis workflow and listening methods.
Overall research supervisor. Spatial audio, virtual acoustics and immersive listening. Leads the technical methods for 3D / 6DoF rendering, auditory display, perceptual listening.
Marine bioacoustics and signal processing. Guides the survey, recording, sorting and analysis of whale vocalisations.
Hosted at Sorbonne Université, Paris, within the Institut Jean Le Rond ∂'Alembert — in the LAM team (Lutheries · Acoustique · Musique), where sound and music are studied across acoustics, signal processing and sono-vibro-tactile research.