The hydrophone node at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center is located
beneath the pier in about 10 meters of water. It was deployed in October,
2006, and utilizes a hydrophone fabricated by Lon Brockelhurst. Custom
software written in Visual Basic by Val Veirs (Windows XP) assesses average
underwater sound levels and automatically detects "unusual" sounds. The stream
is distributed by spacialnet.com
Each sound file (.mp3 format) is named with year, month, day, start time,
end-time, and duration encoded in the file name. The date format is YYMMDD,
start/end times are 24-hr format (PDT time zone), and the duration format is
HHMMSS. These sounds are presented using a Flash-based player called
Wimpy...
File name
Date
Description
071022_1041_1059_001836-pt-calls.mp3
Monday October 22 (10:41-10:59 PDT) -- 18 minutes of calls that grow increasingly faint. (moderate background noise).
The Network was expanded from 2006-2012 with generous support from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Other major funding has come from the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), Beam Reach, and Cornell University (Chuck Greene).
We are working to diversify our sources of support and build resiliency into the network. If you would like to contribute financially, please consider making a donation:
You can also try to record the streams when you hear something that
interests you. We recommend Stream Ripper (free, open
source, all platforms). If you'd like to explore underwater listening even
further (including sound analysis and contributions to citizen science
projects), then consider taking on a Beam Reach
externship in bioacoustics.
Don't hesitate to contact us if you'd like to make
your recording available to the listening community by having us publish it on
this web site. In any case, please abide by the Creative Commons license
