The Journey To The Bottom Of The Ocean - Sonification

For my Sonification project this year I have decided to theme it upon making the journey to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean found in the Mariana Trench.

Image by Erin McCarthy - found on https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a7863/james-camerons-deep-ocean-dive-diagrammed-9479167/

This diagram helps put this journey into perspective. The journey itself has been made by few people, one including Director James Cameron. To represent this journey in terms of how it could sound to represent the different depths, I have had to brainstorm some different ideas. There is a resource that I will add below that allows you to do the journey on a website by scrolling to the bottom whilst the maximum depths you can find certain sea life can be found.

https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ - by Neal Agarwal

One way to have sound from this journey is to have the sounds made by the marine life play at their estimated maximum depth once the user has reached that depth. The issues here come from the fact that not all of the sea life typically makes any kind of vocal sound. Therefore, the sound for a lot of the sea life would have to be some sort of synthetic audio representation which will also take a lot of imagination and time since there are so many different species.

Another way to represent the depth would be the ability to use a sonar ping sent from something to the top that could be triggered by the user at any depth. Therefore, the time in which it would take the sound to reach the user after triggering it and the volume of it would represent the depth of it. I need to research the science of this as well as how best to implement this feature in the project.

I have done some research on the depth of challenger deep in order to calculate the speed of which someone would have to travel in order to reach the bottom in approximately 5 minutes or so. Some suspension of disbelief would have to occur as the speed one would have to descend to reach the bottom in that time is about 81mph, which is fairly fast for anything to descend at. So, taking this into account as well as the synthetic representation of sea life, this project will be more of an art piece as it does not truly represent fact.

Once I have some further updates on this project I will post them here. If you have any questions or know of any helpful resources don't hesitate to reach out.

Thanks for reading the post,

Nick