Deep Ocean Listening

Deep Ocean Listening is an aquatic audio art collective stewarded by acoustic oceanographer David Barclay and sound artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin. A confluence of ocean sounds and creative ways of listening, we engage in transdisciplinary dialogue, relational practice, submergent knowledges, and water-based sound art in order to cultivate living connections to our acoustic commons: the ocean.

We begin with a terrestrial radio broadcast of sounds from the deepest part of the world’s oceans—the so-called “Challenger Deep” in the Mariana Trench, located in the Indigenous Territory of the Chamorros. The sunset to sunrise broadcast on CKDU 88.1 FM depicts a twelve-hour sonic journey through layers of the Pacific to the silted bottom, where the Deep Acoustic Lander sits, listening—before ascending back to the surface.

The Deep Acoustic Lander is an autonomous underwater explorer designed to sink to the bottom of the deepest point on the Earth's oceans while making high-fidelity sound recordings. The vehicle, built in oceanographer David Barclay’s Noise Lab, is centred around a single glass sphere that is able to withstand static pressure at nearly 11 km of depth while measuring the smallest fluctuations that compose the underwater soundscape.

Following Nocturne, witnesses will have the opportunity to take part in an online, participatory event one moon cycle after the broadcast. Hosted by OCEAN/UNI, and facilitated by sound artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin, this workshop is an opportunity to respond to oceanic depths through collaborative storytelling and listening as ceremony. Participants will submerge into the depths of their listening, and be guided in an experience of collective memory—responding to the indescribable yet intimately heard qualities of the deep sea. Asking, How deep into unknowing can we go to listen? we encounter an invitation to be together, over distance, as we widen the acoustic lens and deepen kinship with the ocean.

Following Nocturne, witnesses will have the opportunity to take part in an online, participatory event after the broadcast on November 29, 2023, from 2 - 4 p.m. AST (NOTE: WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL). Hosted by OCEAN/UNI, and facilitated by Lindsay Dawn Dobbin and David Barclay, this workshop will be an opportunity to engage in a collaborative listening and sharing process in response to deep ocean sounds.

More information at deepoceanlistening.earth.