Monday

The monthly Mare-Madeira meet was today They were mostly presenting news of multiple papers. Also news of two events that could be used to showcase the Whale Whisperer if we finish on time. The first is an hour-long tech showcase for Wave Labs at the Deep Sea symposium on Monday 18th, and the second is the Christmas Fair on 20th or 21st. Diane in publicity made a call for posters and so I offered to make one but she doesn’t have a printing budget. She is interested in showing the piece itself it is finished. It’s good to have a definite deadline to work to.

I sat in on the Horizon grant proposal zoom call meeting in which Mark is leading a consortium of possible partners. The were agreeing on the planned stages of the work and whether the general principles of the idea were understood and agreed upon by everyone. The main idea is that this will provide evidence of the state of biodiversity in the various European seas. The North, the Med, the Atlantic and the Irish I think… Baltic is no longer possible because of the war in Ukraine.

TUESDAY

Whale Whisperer: There’s an issue with the magnet switch potentially interfering with the charging coil. One solution proposed was to flip the box to charge. It’s not ideal but much better than the option of an internal USB wire in the otilith which I feel sure is going to fall out or if not, be really trick to retrieve for charging. I’m really hoping we can make the wireless charging work, because it’s just cool and neat. The base will need charging, but we’ll leave a hole at the back to connect a small USB charger. The base can have a larger battery so won’t need charged that often, but it’s not clear yet how big a battery can fit into the otilith. So it might not have much autonomy from the base which is less than ideal.

Jorges pointed out that there was already space in the right place in the otilith for magnets to be concealed, which was a relief because if not I was going to have to resculpt it, which would mean Jorges had to re-mesh and mess about with the edges again which is a huge faff.

Marko and I tried to 3d model the base for the Whale Whisperer. It’s modelled on the approximate dimensions of apple track pad for my computer because the piece looks really good on it. But it needs to be bigger and higher in order to contain all the base components. We tried putting peg points in the corners, but when Jorges got involved he was able to design a neater solution very quickly. The downside is that, in order to preserve the interior space, the dimensions got a bit larger. It’s only 4mm each way, but now I’m not sure how this will look.

Playing with all the components together as a group, it became obvious that Marko and I prefer the smaller size shell. Marko feels that the larger shell is not as aesthetically pleasing and hand-ready as the smaller size original, and I - having double checked the size of a blue whale earbone, which is more or less the size of the original - don’t feel the enlarged one is congruent with the original idea.

Luckily João after careful remeasurement is confident that, the components he has in mind to purchase will fit in to the smaller size.

wednesday

Two happy accidents with the 3d printing: a. Jorges forgot to print the otilith first, perhaps because he was quite excited having designed an elegant click-in locking mechanism for the base; b. The temperature of the bed wasn’t set right so the edges warped meaning the top was not level. Jorges thought we could get away with printing just one side again since the flip side was only for charging but I did not agree so he will start printing the whole thing again tonight..

The base is now clearly too large for the smaller shell, but again, João, having the thing at hand to experiment with, has found a way to fit everything in to a smaller space. Moreover, the magnet and coil are working next to each other: the coil central, the magnet to one side so there is no need for the clumsy flip compromise when charging that none of us were happy with. Jorges did a quick resizing of the base unit and after my pathetic entreaties (since we are running out of days if we go ahead with Friday’s planned day trip around the island), and now the objects are both smaller, he agreed to print everything overnight tonight for João to start assembling tomorrow.

With these aspects of the design in place, I realise I have not had the chance to think much about the content that will be played!

I cannot work on sound in the office with so many noises and distractions so I’ll work at home this afternoon and tomorrow in order to get some tracks ready. The software will be programmable either to play a random selection from the files, which Marko says can be any length I want, or to cycle through each one in turn. I think the latter is preferable, since this means a really motivated audience member could get to hear several different types of calls.

At home, I spend the rest of the day looking at/listening to my recordings from the boat trip with Laura. I have some really nice calls from what I think must be the pilot whales. I need to double check with Laura that these are not bottlenose dolphins because they were also in the area, but it seems more likely that the closer animals would have been what I caught most clearly, and the pilots were very close. Whether I have anything at the low frequency end (the fin whales) is difficult to tell because on audacity the resolution at the lowest frequencies on the spectogram is very poor no matter which settings I choose. I’ve sent a message to Laura asking about which software and settings she uses for this.

The first image below is something I was surprised to find. I can clearly hear two whistles at the point indicated by the arrows, but the only visible indication seems to be the very small lines in the zone where I’ve filtered out the boat noise. The other three images are different spectograms of the same clip. It’s a burst of clicks and then a clear whistle.

THURSDAY

Spent the day at home working on the files and wrote a blurb to run past Diane. Tried a lot of different processes and change of speed etc. Came up with six possible tracks for the Whale Whisperer to try tomorrow.

1. Watkins Blue Whale - pitched up by 100 percent so that it moves from around 17 Herz to 170; amplified, clipping removed; duplicated to get a larger sound and compression used to make it easier on the ear.

2. Watkins Humpback Whales from Bermuda

3. Watkins Sperm Whale clicks - nice rhythms from March 1984 Bermuda. Compressor only.

4. Watkins Fin Whale pitched up 1000 percent, duplicated with slight delay between the two files to create fuller sound. No additional processing in Logic.

5. Possible pilot whale clicks and whistle from trip with Laura.

6. All tracks together in a chorus.

Joåo called to show me the 3d print which looks good.

FRIDAY

João has managed to conceal everything well in the otilith and now has to assemble the base components. Marko is off sick but was in continual Slack contact. He wrote the code to control the Raspberry Pi and play the tracks but up to now it is not working. João is continuing to solder etc. I have heard some tiny bits of the tracks, enough to know that the deeper sounds work reallywell and the clicks and whistles do not. The sperm whale clicks coud be OK but the sloshing sounds are very foregrounded so I will have to try that one again. I will redo the sound track over the weekend and send it on slack.