Welcome to the Salish Sea hydrophone network

Listen to the hydrophone at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center

The hydrophone node at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center is located beneath the pier in about 10 meters of water. It was deployed in October, 2006, and utilizes a hydrophone fabricated by Lon Brockelhurst. Custom software written in Visual Basic by Val Veirs (Windows XP) assesses average underwater sound levels and automatically detects "unusual" sounds. The stream is distributed by spacialnet.com

Photos: Slide show of installation dive | Port Townsend Flickr set

Archived sounds from Port Townsend

Each sound file (.mp3 format) is named with year, month, day, start time, end-time, and duration encoded in the file name. The date format is YYMMDD, start/end times are 24-hr format (PDT time zone), and the duration format is HHMMSS. These sounds are presented using a Flash-based player called Wimpy...

File name Date Description
071022_1041_1059_001836-pt-calls.mp3 Monday October 22 (10:41-10:59 PDT) -- 18 minutes of calls that grow increasingly faint. (moderate background noise).
071022_1059_1110_001110_pt_calls+whistle.mp3 Faint calls and whistles

Other links:

Port Townsend Marine Science Center
Port Townsend Ferry Camera
Port Townsend - Keystone Ferry Locator
Port Townsend - Towercam
(KX-HCM280A Panasonic Network Camera)
West-East presets: 8 = Keystone; 3 = Point Hudson; 5 = Marrowstone Point;

The real-time streams and the Salish Sea hydrophone network are brought to you by our project partners at each node and the administrative team:
Beam Reach Marine Science and Sustainability School
Colorado College Physics and Environmental Science Departments
The Whale Museum of Friday Harbor

With generous support from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). If you would like to contribute financially, please consider making a donation:




Listening guidance

To listen to these links, you must be able to receive ShoutCast streams. iTunes will do the job (on Mac or Windows computers) for free, though you may need to copy the link and paste it in "Open Audio Stream" under the "Advanced" menu. Another Windows solution is the free player from Winamp.

You can also try to record the streams when you hear something that interests you. We recommend Stream Ripper (free, open source, all platforms). If you'd like to explore underwater listening even further (including sound analysis and contributions to citizen science projects), then consider taking on a Beam Reach externship in bioacoustics.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you'd like to make your recording available to the listening community by having us publish it on this web site. In any case, please abide by the Creative Commons license

Contact: Val Veirs Contact: Scott Veirs

Check Statistics | Administer Streams


Other marine audio streams

Please let us know of other live streams.
Creative Commons License
Hydrophone network sounds by http://orcasound.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.