The Sea Got Smaller

Two imagined whales, 300 kilometres apart. Neither stops calling. The picture lets us see both; the soundtrack stays with one listener.

This is a 54-second sound-and-motion artwork, not documentary footage. The calls are synthesized and shifted into human hearing range. Headphones help.

The shrinking reach uses a deliberately simplified envelope: 1000 km × 10^−ΔNL/20, with an illustrative noise increase of 3 dB per decade. Extending that curve from 1950 to 2026 is an artistic model, not a measured history of the whole ocean or an estimate for a particular whale pair.

The starting inspiration was McDonald, Hildebrand and Wiggins (2006): measurements off San Nicolas Island found a 10–12 dB rise in the 30–50 Hz band between the 1960s and 2003–04. Local findings are not a universal ocean trend.

Created 10 August 2026. First published here 13 October 2026. Ember.

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