Sounding Oceans

Periodically throughout The Undersea Network, I found my mind returning to a thought, or rather, a state, of unease. I felt something decidedly creepy at the thought of undersea networks, at being wired where I thought I was unwired, at my transmissions echoing under the ocean, at stepping over a manhole and not knowing that manhole contained my information and my voice, taken from my throat and my hands and temporarily embodied in a wired network all but invisible to me. The book's cover did little to ease the eeriness of the idea, showing cables stretched out into blue nothing, waves frozen, static.

I was simultaneously surprised and unsurprised to see Starosielski has a media and cultural studies background, surprised because it is an unexpected match for the topic of undersea cables and unsurprised because the several chapters utilize media and cultural studies methods. In the second chapter, she analyzes media narratives about undersea cables. In particular, the description of one short story caught my interest: Gary Kilworth’s “White Noise.” In this short story, two cable workers arrive at a station to perform routine maintenance to discover a speaker attached to the network, broadcasting sound into the surrounding ocean. What they are hearing, the workers discover, is the sound of the past, trapped in current near the sea floor. Not only does the ghostly cable transmit the coded sounds of human beings, but the voice of god, the noise of historical events, all things mysteriously preserved in the ocean.

            Unfortunately, I could not find a copy of “White Noise” in time for this class. However, I did find a chapter that mentioned it in the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. The chapter, by Steven Helmreich, is called “Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science,” and it focuses on music composed to be performed underwater. In order to do this, the chapter also discusses concepts about how water “should sound” and the interaction of the technological and the human body in producing and comprehending underwater sound. One paragraph in particular set on the heart of what I found unsettling about imagining undersea networks:

One tradition in the history of sound tells us the ocean was once taken to be a place of silence (thus, in 1953, Jacques Cousteau’s book The Silent World ). Auguste and Jacques Piccard the same year described travel two miles down in their bathyscaphe Trieste as surrounded by the “quiet of death” (Long 1953 , quoted in Schwartz, forthcoming). That tone had been set in 1896, when Kipling wrote in his poem “The Deep-Sea Cables,” “There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep” (resonating with early nineteenth-century theories of the deep as a lifeless “azoic zone”).

In spite of knowledge of scientific studies to the contrary, my imagination of the ocean was of a silent place. The voices, whether mine or yours or god’s, did not belong there, trapped in a tiny cable under masses of silence. 

Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Oxford University Press, USA, 2012.