Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses the role of listening to locate whales in tourist settings in the Norwegian Arctic. It explores not only what kinds of human-whale relations the hydrophone affords, but also the poetics of sound and silence, absence and presence that define this mode of sensory engagement.

Paper Abstract:

This paper attempts to account for the sonic component of human-whale relations during whale watching tours and discusses some issues raised in this process. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork across two summers, carried out in the Norwegian Arctic town of Andenes. During whale watching tours, an underwater microphone called a hydrophone is lowered into the water and used to locate, with a fair degree of accuracy, the sperm whales emitting clicking noises below. I will first explain how this process works, before discussing the history of how the hydrophone came to be so vital to both scientific research and tourism in Andenes. I am interested in how listening to – or perhaps more accurately, eavesdropping on – whales remoulds expectations of what a tour can be, precipitating a shift from sight to sound. By telling fieldwork stories, I explore not only the different kinds of human-whale relations that the hydrophone affords, but also the poetics of sound and silence, absence and presence that define this mode of sensory engagement. Finally, I will discuss how listening to whales as a method in ethnographic research opens up the listener conceptually and practically to not only whale sounds, but also to other, less welcome sounds in the form of underwater noise pollution, which is known to be a worsening problem for cetaceans.