Very cool! So is the circular resistance strip controlling pitch? If so how are you controlling it underwater? I really like the control buttons, nice solution to that design 'problem'.

Awesome! I’m even more curious about the sounds you have programmed into it!

From what I found, cetaceans have 2 sound production mechanisms - clicks and tones; one mainly for navigation and 'seeing', another for talking with one another (we think). Many times they do both simultaneously. I've dedicated one performance knob to LFO and one for Rate, so I can add in pulsing and pulse frequency to a given note. This way I can 'switch' between tones and pulses.

Frequency-wise, dolphins can generate and hear sounds 3-5 octaves beyond human hearing (140kHz+), whereas MIDI note #127 is still a bit below human limit (12.5 kHz). Cetaceans can process sound as well as we process light, so it may be as though some alien comes to earth and tries to communicate with humans using only orange and red crayons. :-) To get really high notes I would have had to get a non-MIDI, pure analog synth, but it would have much more complicated to implement.

I created a couple of patches based on what I'm guessing would be interesting to them - one with 'vowels' as a base sound, one with the wave tables to switch between waveforms quickly. The triangle and the sawtooth are also programmed so perhaps dolphins can hear and figure out harmonics. All of these with just a single oscillator to keep things simple for now.

@Flo - I'm getting a gopro!

Marvellous, hope Flipper Will love that! And the ‘object’ is really biautiful. What do you use as speaker?

hmm there is a long tradition of this on the west coast. In the 70s someone out here used a serge on a sailboat to drive an underwater speaker. Alex morton began her whale work because as a student she had a summer job cataloguing Dr. Lilly’s dolphin library. Vancouver aquarium guy John Ford has done a lot of listening and tape play back with orca pods. The tricky part is driving low tones, very very low tones take a lot of power if you want them to travel hundreds of miles (they do). Bernie Krause used sound to lead a whale out of a California river system a long time ago, its covered in a chapter of wild sounds which has a great nature soundscape cd in the back.

Ha! :-D

This is exactly the kind of interspecies miscommunication I want to bypass by being in the water with the synth. Since most of the communication attempts in the past were by people on boats dropping speakers overboard and piping music, sounds out I'm sure dolphins & whales would mistaken boats as intelligent beings. And since the sound that boats generate are engine / propeller noises we ended up with this wonderful video.

by the way I am for what you are doing, don’t want to be misunderstood on that point. post the date you doing this if you want to entertain the trident guys : – ) A lot of undersea sound research was driven by the cold war, sorting out dolphins and whales from sub prop noise and various signatures, which begat Lilly and a lot of other ex-mil undersea scholars that opened up that soundscape. John Ford and Bernie Krause have both used predator warning recordings to try and move whales back out to open water. Saw John’s Nagra.

Tidal energy generators are introducing a whole new set of issues, not just acoustic, especially the turbines that commercial people are fond of dropping in rip tide areas up on the shelf. I favour the norwegian vertical pump because they generate power away from biologically dense areas which tend to be at undersea sandbars and areas of fast tidal motion. Less bio-disruption except the shadow footprint of the modular barges which all things considered I can live with. They are wave action dependent, not tidal, more consistent on that count as well. Navy types go way deeper with their turbines, less impact. Once saw touched the hull of the machine that did the Marianas Trench. That’s a long cold silent drop. They could have used a shruthi.

@loderbast,

I will be freediving (breath hold dive without air tank) and using the synth below 5m. From surface to 5m deep there is an acoustic noise layer that inhibits sounds from traveling very far. The synth's low power will also be too easily drowned out by scuba bubbles or other noises, so I need all the advantages I can get.

I have had the privilege of swimming amongst wild dolphins in the past. Their way of life is speed, and humans are useless in the water, so it's a big deal for them to slow down just so we could hang out with them. Am crossing fingers.

Peter

Hello folks,

I am back from Hawaii, where I tested the underwater synth to a degree of success.

I say 'to a degree' because although I learned a lot more about what sort of communication is possible with dolphins and whales, it turned out the synth didn't make it any easier to interact with them. I had limited number of encounters (four) with wild dolphins roughly one hour each, and the learning curve was very steep. So I have to go back again and try next year.

Here are a few things I learned so far:

- They were not interested in humanly sounds. Standard synth patch sounds and sequences don't hold their attention at all.
- The only sounds they were interested in were sounds that approximated their own (the clicks and tones I mentioned earlier). This may be because it eminated from a living being roughly their size (me).
- With sounds, as with other interactions (swimming, game-playing, etc) dolphins have short attention spans and expect you to be interesting or entertaining. The moment you stop being that they will go on to something / somewhere else.

I made a short video of the testing and their positive response here. Enjoy!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-by_dl1OGFU

dolphins have short attention spans and expect you to be interesting or entertaining. The moment you stop being that they will go on to something / somewhere else.

Ahhh, the facebook generation :(

Nice! I’ve been waiting for this :)

Too bad they weren’t that interested..
Isn’t there any way to multiply the frequency output, so as to get higher pitches?

Ah.. didn’t think of that.. :)

Perhaps modulate with something like this: Crystal 32.768KHz CMOS Oscillator?

Read Lilly The Mind in the Water? used copies here www.abebooks.com. I'm thinking a noisebug is more clicky butas its in water and involves body capacitance...