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Sound Warp

December 19, 2018

This curious, colorful image may look a little like five bananas, but it is actually a spectrogram of sound waves recorded by a hydrophone in the ocean. More particularly, it is a spectrogram of sound signals that have been warped—a signal processing technique that WHOI acoustician Julien Bonnel in the WHOI Ocean Acoustics and Signal Lab is investigating. Warping gives scientists the ability to disentangle a cacophony of sound signals in the ocean—ranging from whale calls and ship and submarine noises to airguns used to explore for oil and natural gas. (Julien Bonnel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)