Listening To The World
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.
My brain was adapted to listen at multiple levels at a very early age, so that in 1972, when Roger Payne first placed headphones over my ears and let me listen to a recording from a bay in southern Argentina full of wildness, I heard the overture to a grand symphony.
A few years later, when I first dipped a pair of hydrophones beneath the frozen Arctic Ocean, I heard choruses of songs, grander than any Vaughan Williams or Benjamin Britten masterpiece. In 1992, when the U.S. Navy offered me the opportunity to listen to the deep ocean on a global scale, it was as if I had been transported into a C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy!
Everywhere I listened — the living world was singing. In the Arctic Ocean a distant bowhead whale sang with two independent voices, bass and soprano, such that at 30 miles away it sounded as if there was a full choir of whales approaching. Nearby beneath a massive piece of multi-year ice, bearded seal songs spiraled out of the ether from the highest audible frequencies and then back up again, as if to accompany the landing and takeoff of a Martian spacecraft; and a pod of whistling, chirping, and clicking beluga whales bounded through that acoustic space like a troupe of jesters dancing over the Arctic’s frozen countryside.
A decade later I listened through the Navy’s giant acoustic telescopes while a vast herd of singing humpback whales migrated overhead from Alaska to Hawaii, and blue whale songs reached my ears from across an ocean basin.
Those Navy experiences stretched my mind’s conceptualization of space, time and frequency and exposed me to the global scales over which the world was singing. They gave me a constant series of epiphanies wherever I was listening. In the midnight jungles of central Africa where every creature, from the tiniest insects to forest elephants, contribute to the acoustic scene. In a Louisiana bayou, while in search of the last Ivory Billed Woodpecker, as the dawn chorus of birds erupted into its morning overture that was one day’s contribution to the seasonal ebb and flow of life.
All these voices contributed to the full chorus of singing that rises and falls with the cycles of the earth and moon, spanning fourteen octaves with frequencies so low and so high I could not hear their full range — at least not until I had invented technologies to convert them into various musical-like forms that looked and sounded like an Escher lithograph.
Somewhere along this journey I realized that the whole world was singing. I was in love with this singing planet, and I wanted everyone to hear its songs.
At each of these junctions life offered me choices. At every one I’ve turned away from the proximately, but not ultimately better choice. As my reward, I’ve been blessed with a life in which there is no difference between my avocation and my vocation [read Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud time”]. Choir School was not my choice alone, but I chose to sing my heart out every day, and learned that formalized religion was no substitute for spiritual freedom and enlightenment.
Matriculating in the Engineering College at Stony Brook University in 1967 was not a choice alone, but taught me that the talents of engineering, though essential, are only one arrow in a full quiver, so I convolved my cerebral space with a double major in engineering and biology. Delaying a full scholarship for an M.D.-PhD degree to join a National Geographic expedition on whales off southern Argentina was no mere choice of a next step, but it opened a window into an avocation-vocation opportunity such that I never went to Med School. In 1980 an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at The Rockefeller University in avian song learning was not a mere choice, but eventually showed me that a traditional academic track was too constraining and full of haunted houses.
Accepting an offer in 1987 to start a bioacoustics research program at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology was not my choice alone, and it was a journey absolutely filled with discovery, opportunity and a cornucopia of unbelievable experiences. I imagined, nourished and grew that opportunity into a program with 60 full-time professionals, from physicists to ecologists. We routinely deployed acoustic recorders all over the world, collecting 100–150 years of raw data every year. The globe was our stage and our ambitions were to quantitatively describe its acoustic characteristics and find the voices of some of its most endangered species. However, the sheer scale of this endeavor drowned the technical reality.
We entered the world of big data solutions. We could no longer use traditional analytical mechanisms, and needed to change our entire scientific paradigm or drown. Metaphorically, we had to move from Newtonian physics to relativity physics.
So we started to use supercomputers. We started merging the expertise of human listeners with deep-learning, data-mining algorithms. Nevertheless, after 26 years, this amazingly wonderful academic environment started to reveal its limitations, especially those that evolve within the bureaucracies of scale and risk averse impediments.
In 2012, as I was searching for ways to deal with the ever growing challenge of finding extremely rare acoustic events in enormous quantities of data, I was introduced to Rainer Sternfeld who had started a new kind of company called Marinexplore. On our first Skype call Rainer offered to support a Kaggle data science competition to automatically recognize the sounds of a highly endangered whale. I supplied the training and test datasets: Kaggle and the world did the rest. After 10 weeks there were over 230 competitors, 23 of which delivered code with >90% performance! This experience completely changed the problem-solution landscape. I was hooked.
Thus, in the spring of 2013 I arrived at the edge of a personal grand canyon: majestic in its view, deep with heritage and endowed with grand, multi-coloured layers of antiquity and esoteric discovery. Thinking, if I should choose to stay in that journey, I would limit myself in many ways, I chose another path; a path of opportunity that was not my choice alone, but is nonetheless one of my best choices. In the meantime, my friend Rainer had proceeded with Marinexplore which by then had transformed into Planet OS.
Planet OS is a Silicon Valley data technology company focused on Earth Observation, and it continues my life’s avocation-vocation paradigm. Why is that? How is it that at a time in life when I should be slowing down and settling into a comfy chair on the back porch that I find such inspiration, motivation and gravitational attraction? The answer is simple. This company is not in business to provide some profitable but incremental glitz. Quite the contrary. It aims to take us all to the next level of reality — to create a planetary nervous system by bringing all possible sources of sensor data together; to make it accessible to anyone from anywhere, anytime.
My ambition for the future of bioacoustics is a reflection of what I have acquired from listening to the world of song. I want everyone to hear the songs of this singing planet: to discover, appreciate and know that song is a fundamental quality, a basic common denominator of life on earth. Song is a reflection of life’s soul.
Right now, if you went to www.listenforwhales.org you would be connected to a network of underwater ears in the shipping lanes off Boston, Massachusetts. That 45 mile long auditory system was initially placed there to act as a sentinel for protecting endangered whales from being run over by commercial ships. The first of its kind in the world, it is easily expandable to include more sensors and cover greater distances. Dial into the University of Washington’s amazing sensor network on the Juan de Fuca ridge off the northwest coast of the United States, to gain a glimpse into the future of ocean discovery. We must facilitate the synthesis of global ocean information from data ingestion to knowledge. Science and technology are constantly evolving the building blocks to create systems of systems. Those blocks are now available to take us to the next level.
So my small gift to this ambitious, multi-faceted mindshift is my time, brain, experience and fearless conviction for hope. Hope that others, with and without backbones, with and without hair on their bodies, some with scales, some with feathers, some with lives much longer than ours, some with roots and crowns that breathe silently into the night sky, some that rise and fall with the sun’s light, some visibly invisible — that some of all of us will make it through this transform, not just as atoms, molecules or remnants, but as whole essential beings divested of the fear of death and blessed with the joy of shared living; singing and listening to the moon, stars, the ocean’s luminescence and each other.
Never stop listening to what this singing planet has to say,
Dr. Christopher W. Clark
