$5 Whale Listening Hydrophone Making Workshop

I worked on DAS acoustic monitoring for subsea power cables (to monitor cable health!), turns out they are basically a submarine detection system.

Here [1] is a page at Klover, and here [2] is one at Shure. Not sure if there's a formal specification for this, or if it's just something that manufacturers started doing.

[1]: https://www.kloverproducts.com/blog/what-is-plugin-power

[2]: https://service.shure.com/s/article/difference-between-bias-...

Can we now have lot of audio records with a documentation of whale behavior to train an AI and get a whale-translator at the end?

Most bioacoustics work now is: deploy a recorder, stream terabytes to the cloud, let a model find “whale = 0.93” segments, and then maybe a human listens to 3 curated clips in a slide deck. The goal is classification, not experience. The machines get the hours-long immersion that Roger Payne needed to even notice there was such a thing as a song, and humans get a CSV of detections.

A $5 hydrophone you built yourself flips that stack. You’re not going to run a transformer on it in real time, you’re going to plug it into a laptop or phone and just…listen. Long, boring, context-rich listening, exactly the thing the original discovery came from and that our current tooling optimizes away as “inefficient”.

If this stuff ever scales, I could imagine two very different futures: one is “citizen-science sensor network feeding central ML pipelines”, the other is “cheap instruments that make it normal to treat soundscapes as part of your lived environment”. The first is useful for papers. The second actually changes what people think the ocean is.

The $5 is important because it makes the second option plausible. You don’t form a relationship with a black-box $2,000 research hydrophone you’re scared to break. You do with something you built, dunked in a koi pond, and used to hear “fish kisses”. That’s the kind of interface that quietly rewires people’s intuitions about non-human worlds in a way no spectrogram ever will.

Recording full-fidelity whale or dolphin sounds (amongst others) requires using a higher sample rate than is available in most consumer-grade equipment. There's a lot more information down there!