WHOI 2018: Hydrophone

This year I have continued my relationship with WHOI, and have started a very interesting project. My challenge is to build a small hydrophone to listen to sounds underwater and learn more about sound pollution and how it affects marine life.  I am also attempting to connect the hydrophone to a phone so we can collect sound data in different areas in Martha’s Vineyard. 

Once we arrived in Woods Hole Amanda and I met Stacey Strong, the WHOI teacher fellow that we worked with last year on our microplastics project.  She took us to the applied ocean physics and engineering department.  Before we started to construct the Hydrophone, I met with a few other researchers.  

Beckett Colson showed me the new projects he was working on in the Deep Submergence Laboratory and all of the new things going on the lab since I had last been there. Walking into the lab brought back lots of memories from last year, like when we emptied out the bottle of dove body wash to find if their were microplastics in it and all of the different high tech tools they used such as the mining analyzer that looks almost like a radar gun. This year the lab looked completely different, well at least the projects did. Becket has been designing and making a small machine that analyzes carbon levels in certain gasses by using an infrared laser that beams throughout these resin printed tubes that chamber the gas. It is crazy to think that Beckett made this because it almost looks like some high tech movie prop. After walking around the room a bit something caught my eye, there was what looked to be an ROV in the process of being built, and it was not any ordinary ROV.  This ROV was made to go down very deep. 

After leaving the lab, Beckett introduced me to William Pardis, who was working on a small device that could be strapped to drones to measure gases. 

After learning about some really interesting work, we started to build the hydrophone.  To construct the hydrophone we used a video created by an engineer.  This video was created to make it possible for those interested in science projects to build a hand-on, affordable hydrophone. Click here to watch the video.  Click here if you would like the handwritten instructions.  As we were building the hydrophone, I learned a lot of new things such as how to use a soldering gun.

Connecting the hydrophone to our phone was not as easy we expected.  After doing a little bit of research, I figured out that we had the incorrect adaptor.  We needed a microphone to audio adapter because iphone needs a four band audio input and the one we were using is a three band microphone input cable.  When we plugged in our hydrophone, the iphone did not recognize it.  So far we have not been able to get it to work, but we are hopeful that after our new adapter comes in, we will be able to get it to work.  Currently we can hear tapping noises when the hydrophone is plugged into headphones, but when we tested it out in Menemsha Harbor near the bike ferry, we did not pick up any of the sounds.   As Stacey Strong stated, “The key to engineering is being able to embrace the struggle as part of the process.”