The Blue Machine by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Sound

In the western world, Jacques-Yves Cousteau is widely considered to be the giant of ocean storytelling,16 and generations of documentary-makers now stand on his broad shoulders. From the 1950s onwards, his films, books and TV documentaries brought something entirely new into households across the world: a view of the ocean from the inside. He coinvented the ‘Aqualung’ – the first modern scuba-diving equipment – in the 1940s with his collaborator Émile Gagnan,17 and opened the door to a more personal exploration of the seas. In the 1930s, William Beebe in his bathysphere had revelled in seeing the delights of the ocean, but Cousteau and his team weren’t limited to mere observation of such living treasures – they could poke them, tease them, follow them, pick them up and bring them back for scientists to study. And, most importantly, they could film them, using newly developed underwater cameras, so that the rest of the world could join the adventure. It is undeniable that those films reset our view of the ocean, converting it from a frightening theatre of war into a wonderland of natural delights. Cousteau’s first film, based on his first book, burst into the world in 1956, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and also an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. This was the ocean’s great debut on the world stage, watched by kings and queens, politicians and artists, tradespeople, office workers and wide-eyed children. So it is to the lasting bafflement of anyone who studies the ocean that this great and important work of art had a name that was deeply misleading: The Silent World. The ocean certainly isn’t silent.18

Few film-makers would have resisted the temptation to give the ocean such a dramatic and spookily alien character. But the other reasons why this title might have passed without much comment are much more interesting, because they’re woven into the nature of underwater sound itself. The water, our own anatomy and our methods of exploration are very effective at hiding nature’s subaquatic music from us.

It starts at the surface. The familiar sound of the ocean is breaking waves at the beach, waves that roll in from far away and roar as they tumble and splash, generating billions of bubbles which fizz gently as they burst. But these are surface events, not the sound of the ocean’s innards. On a completely calm day, no sound from the ocean reaches our ears, and that’s because the ocean surface itself acts like a double mirror. Sound coming from below is reflected back downwards and sound coming from above is reflected back upwards. The worlds of above and below are acoustically almost entirely separate.

It takes an enormous effort to squash water and make it a bit smaller by applying pressure.19 If you shove on water, those molecules, instead of being compressed into a smaller space, push into the ones ahead of them, and those ones quickly adjust by shoving on the ones ahead of them, which shove on the ones ahead of that.

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