On the website, the whale songs are visualized on a spectrogram (picture of sound). You can zoom in to see and hear individual humpback whale sounds, or you can zoom out to see the larger songs and patterns they form.
The AI highlights similar sounds within the humpback whale songs, helping you see patterns within the songs.
This is a closeup of the spectrogram. Those golf club looking things are whale sounds.
This is a closeup of the heat map. The redder the color the more likely whales are singing. Prior to this tech, a marine biologist would have to pour through spectrograms like the one above. They could look at about 30 seconds of sound at a time, me
This is a humpback whale making a series of sounds that sound like “bloops.” This is from Feb. 25, 2015, off the coast of Hawaii’s big island.
This is a humpback song over the course of about an hour.
This is actually a ship passing the underwater microphone. It’s super loud compared to the whale calls - that human made noise pollution is actually a major concern for marine biologists.
Still interested? Cool. This is where the whales you hear on the site are. NOAA drops the underwater recorders (hydrophones) in the water for up to a year at a time, then goes and picks them up and listens.
This is a HARP (high frequency audio recording package) disassembled back at NOAA’s lab. That’s what lives underwater and records the ocean noise that the scientists then download and analyze.
That’s Ann, the marine biologist, wearing the cool NOAA hat and life vest. That’s Matt, the software engineer, wearing a periodic table t-shirt.
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