An immersive dive into the acoustic world of whales — making the ocean's hidden soundscape audible, tangible, and impossible to ignore.
OCEAN EARS aims to create technologies for expanded listening, sensing, feeling and embodied contemplation, grounded in accurate scientific knowledge from the marine sciences — to deepen awareness and protect our future.
To facilitate a smooth green transition and to protect our oceans, we must develop collective thinking and focus on solutions. Too often each researcher, group or individual effort works in isolation. Outputs are focused on conferences and publications that remain in specific disciplines. We need strategies and technologies that bring our strengths together, so that public engagement and multidisciplinary work can drive change. Too often, the headlines that reach the general public contain misinformation or partial truths.
This is challenging due to the variety of sectors and the lack of currently available efficient tools. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the OCEAN EARS project presents an innovative geospatial map and physical sound installations. These are built on a curated collection of marine bioacoustic data, focused on the experience of immersive listening to the sounds of whales and the ocean, to hear and feel their underwater acoustic reality — including the damaging effects of anthropogenic noise pollution. The aim: to deepen public empathy and appreciation for marine life.
OCEAN EARS places whale song at the centre of an underwater orchestra — together with the geophony of earthquakes, storms and waves, the biophony of marine life, and the anthropophony of human-made noise. Rendered in hyperreal, spatial detail, these sounds let people sense the reality whales actually live in.
Drawing on decades of continuous hydrophone recordings and the work of marine bioacoustician communities and research groups, the project transforms specialist scientific data into a sonic archive — one you can listen to, not just look at.
At its core, OCEAN EARS is a collective project. It seeks meaningful collaboration with specialists in marine bioacoustics, technologists of listening, art communities and the public. To tune into the songs of whales, to educate, to listen and to understand better how to act.
An intelligent, geo-tagged library of marine sound — organised by species, place, time and call type, carefully attributed, and built for science, conservation and listening.
A browser-based listening map. Swim through 3D soundscapes, turn your head toward a singing whale, move closer, and hear the ocean change across seasons and years.
Physical spaces where whale song is felt as well as heard — infrasound below the threshold of hearing, delivered through the body as vibration.