Listening To The World
By: Planet Os
Tags: Big Data, Life, Oceans, Environment, Technology

This feature story is a personal retrospect of the extraordinary career and life of Dr. Christopher W. Clark, one of the world’s leading marine acoustics experts. He is the Chief Marine Scientist at Planet OS with 30 years of experience in the field.

In 1992, the first time I tried to listen to a singing blue whale in very deep water all I heard was a giant hum. I was convinced that my recording equipment was broken. I checked all the cable connections, all the dial settings; everything was working. I knew some singers were out there because I could see their voiceprints on the Navy displays. And then it hit me — of course I couldn’t hear the whales because my ears and mind were not tuned to perceive the pitch or rhythms of their songs. The pitch was below my threshold of hearing, a single note lasted 20 seconds, and a single phrase lasted almost 2 minutes! But I knew how to solve this problem. I had to play back the recording at a much higher speed, and when I did — voila, I heard the whales singing!

And to my joyful surprise it was not just one singer, but an entire chorus, and as I listened longer it was not just one chorus, but the entire ocean!

I grew up on Bound Brook Island in the town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We were surrounded by pristine wilderness. Our home and those of my grandparents were always filled with music, poetry and literature books. I happened to have a very good ear and a cherubic voice, so when I was nine years old, my mother drove me to New York City to audition for the boy’s choir at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.

I passed my audition, was accepted with a scholarship, and between ages 9 and 13, I attended the cathedral’s choir school as a boy soprano. Alec Wyton, a brilliant musician and phenomenal teacher from Kings College, England, was our Master of Choristers. We had choir practice and sang in the cathedral twice a day six days a week.

At the cathedral choir school I was trained to think in sound. I learned how to read music; transcribing its oddly but methodically shaped symbols of time, pitch, and intensity into song. I learned how to contribute my voice into the complexities of a choral arrangement in which mine was but one of 40 soprano voices inside an arrangement that included 30 alto, tenor, and bass voices. And from that I learned how to invert the process; how to dissect complex musical scenes into component parts. I was taught and learned an entirely new “language” — the language of music, song and sound. All of this permeated not just the way I listened, but also the way I sensed the world and my existence. In a very abstract way, and similar to the way we each have a “mind’s eye”, I acquired a “mind’s ear”. It was an absolutely amazing experience that has served as a foundation throughout my life.

As I grew up and up it never occurred to me that others had not acquired the same skills or did not possess the same level of auditory sensitivity. I saw in sound. Maybe I was predisposed to this, I don’t know, but it’s a core part of who I am. Just as there are some who can do mathematical metaphorical somersaults, I do the same — only in the universe of sound.