ABSTRACT
How does life sound underwater? How have people apprehended sounds subaqueous and submarine? As humans, our access to underwater sonic realms is modulated by means fleshy and technological. Bones, endolymph fluid, cilia, hydrophones, and sonar equipment are just a few apparatuses that bring watery sounds into human audio worlds. As this list suggests, the media through which humans hear sound under water can reach from the scale of the singular biological body up through the socially distributed and technologically tuned-in community. For the social scale, which is peopled by submariners, physical oceanographers, marine biologists, and others, the underwater world—and the undersea world in particular—often emerges as a “field” (a wildish, distributed space for investigation) and occasionally as a “lab” (a contained place for controlled experiments).
