A Whale's Heart
When a whale dives, its heart slows: from about thirty beats a minute at the surface to two at depth. This piece follows one whale's dive and lets you hear it.
Listen
The live version runs in your browser: the dive is drawn as it plays, and SuperCollider turns each moment of depth into a heartbeat.
Open the live versionPress Play to start the sound. Best on a computer with headphones, in Chrome, Edge or Firefox. Safari and phones are not tested yet. The first visit reloads once while the page prepares.
How depth becomes sound
| Sound | At the surface | At 133 m |
|---|---|---|
| Heart rate | 30 bpm (a beat every 2 s) | 2 bpm (every 30 s) |
| Loudness | full | near silent |
| Pitch and speed | 1.00× | 0.26×, lower and slower |
| Lunge (feeding) | heart rate ×2.5 | |
The silence between beats grows in step with depth, so the deep part of the dive is heard mostly as waiting. The whale's position, from a satellite tag, moves the sound between left and right.
The data
Depth. An Icelandic whale, one depth reading per second over 27 hours, 28–29 June 2018, down to 133 m. From Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson's project.
Position. A Pacific blue whale's GPS track (tag 2015CA-MK10-00838, Point Mugu, California, July–August 2015). It stands in until GPS for the Icelandic whale is available.
Palacios, D. and Mate, B. Blue and Fin Whale Movements from Tags Deployed in California (2014–2017) and in Oregon (2018). Marine Mammal Institute, Oregon State University; Axiom Data Science. doi:10.24431/rw1k463. Free to use and redistribute; provided without warranty.
Credits
Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson: concept and proposal, aesthetics, the installation, and the art–science dialogue with the specialists.
Miguel Angel Crozzoli, in collaboration: music technology, sonification and interaction design, software, and composition.
Software
The sound is made by SuperCollider, running in your browser. It uses SuperCollider's own WebAssembly build (unreleased, commit 5d47207): scsynth and sclang under the GPL-3.0, the WebAssembly bindings under the AGPL-3.0. See its licence and notes. This page's source, including the SuperCollider code, is at github.com/mCrozzoli/a-whales-heart.