Imagine it’s midday on March 7, 1949 and you are on board the research vessel Atlantis, off the coast of Bermuda. The steel-hulled sailboat has two masts and measures over 143 feet. It’s the first ship built specifically for interdisciplinary marine research. Your mission: to better understand how sound travels through the ocean.
Other boats in your small fleet are dropping munitions and various objects into the water, making an underwater racket. Your job is to submerge a waterproofed microphone and record the sounds it picks up.
Imagine your surprise when your mic picks up the haunting, echo-like song of a humpback whale. But you have no way of knowing what made that noise. So you do your best to label the recordings with something identifiable. You jot down "fish noises" and "echoing fish."
Fast forward to the fall of 2025. WHOI Archivist Ashley Jester is working on digitizing early audio recordings housed in long stacks of drawers and shelves in temperature-controlled vaults. Some are reel-to-reel recordings and others are early magnetic cassette tapes. Both are deteriorating with age.
There are also transparent blue discs – like floppy versions of albums you’d spin on a record player. Bigger than a 45 but smaller than an LP. These were recorded using an office dictation machine called a Gray Audograph. Those are holding up better, so there’s been less pressure to digitize them.
"We have focused on digitizing the materials that are most at risk," Jester explained. "I think the reason that the Audographs kind of flew under the radar, so to speak, for so long was because they weren't a risky format and so there wasn't any urgency to getting them digitized."
But looking through the archives recently, descriptions of the contents of Audograph discs – written on their paper sleeves, like album liner notes – caught Jester’s eye.
"It said things like ‘fish noises’ and ‘whoop whoop fish’," she said. "And that made me think there was probably something interesting on that recording, but we didn't know what it was."
Jester had a hunch this could be a significant discovery. She understood that the scientists onboard the Atlantis didn’t know what made the sounds they had captured.
Fortunately for Jester, she has easy access to people like WHOI’s Laela Sayigh, an expert on marine mammal vocalizations.
Her verdict:
"Definitely a humpback whale. They're very distinctive. So luckily, that was not too difficult to identify. They're one of only a couple of species that make very kind of lengthy and complex songs."
Even in its early years, WHOI was a leader in marine mammal bioacoustics. But Jester said grabbing the earliest known recording of a humpback whale was somewhat by chance.
"1949, after World War II, the US Navy had figured out that sonar was really important, but we still didn't know a lot about how sound traveled underwater — the physics of it, how it was impacted by depth and salinity and temperature," she said. "And so they were out doing basic research about how sound propagated underwater."
Making those recordings was no easy task.
"The hydrophone was connected to a transducer, an inverter that allowed it to process its signal both to a machine that recorded the sonar output and then also allowed it write to the gray autograph," Jester said.
Sayigh said, given all that, the recording is remarkably good.
"It's pretty great," she said. "I mean, it's really identifiable what the sounds are. [They] are pretty clear and analyzable for sure. I was amazed."
For Sayigh, a senior research specialist, the 1949 recordings are still providing an opportunity to investigate.
"It shows what the soundscape was like, you know, a long time ago and could potentially be compared to recordings in the same area today to get a sense of how much background noise has increased," she said.
That’s important because we know that human-made sounds impact ocean species. But we’re still learning how and to what extent.
Jester says those types of opportunities are what the archives are all about.
"These disks allow us to travel back in time," Jester said. "When I talk to people about data collection and the importance of maintaining and preserving data, it's because you can't go back to March 7th, 1949 and re-record what happened that day."
But thanks to members of Atlantis cruise 154, that moment in time is right at our fingertips.
