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DPA hydrophone captures whale song
Fri, 19 Jun 2009
BBC sound recordist Joe Stevens has used the DPA 8011 hydrophone to record whale sounds in Alaska and the Arctic for the recently televised BBC One TV series, Nature's Great Events.
Stevens made two separate trips, the first to Southeast Alaska to capture the unique humpback whale bubble netting behavior that occurs there, featured in The Great Feastepisode. Bubble netting is a sound the whales use to help surround herring with a rising net of bubbles, before exploding up through the centre with mouth agape to swallow as much fish as possible.
The whales’ song is key to this amazing behaviour and Stevens recorded the call using a single DPA 8011 hydrophone recording onto a solid state compact flash recorder. The hydrophone was deployed from the filming boat and let down as deep as the cable would allow, with boat engines turned off. Keeping a safe distance from the whales, the best recordings were taken on flat, calm days that further minimised background noise, making the recordings particularly clear. The DPA 8011 hydrophone was supplied by UK distributor Sound Network,
Stevens subsequently used the DPA 8011 on a trip to the Canadian Arctic, where the team spent a month on the sea ice finding and filming narwhals - elusive tusked whales - during their annual journey through the inlets as the ice breaks up. This migration was featured in the opening episode, The Great Melt. The team worked on the edge of the ice, again deploying the hydrophone as deep as possible to minimise the sounds of ice movement. ”It was essential for everyone to turn off snow mobiles and even stop walking as we could hear the sounds of footsteps transmitted through the ice,” says Stevens. “The whales use echolocation and an astonishing variety of whistles, pops and clicks to find cracks and openings in the ice where they can surface to breathe during their migration.”
These unique underwater sound recordings helped illustrate the fascinating biology of these whales that use sound to survive in such remote and wild locations.
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