Tunes from the deep resurface

Tunes from the deep resurface

While you won’t find the notes of the Bigeye Scad, the Atlantic Croaker, and the Rock Hind on the shelves of your local music store or on MP3.com anytime soon, they do have a new CD featuring their ratchet sounds, whistles and drums.

The three are among a collection of recordings of more than 150 species of fish from the western North Atlantic that is now available on CD from the URI Graduate School of Oceanography.

The compilation represented decades of work at URI’s Narragansett Marine Laboratory (which later became the GSO) by the late scientist Marie Poland Fish and electronics engineer William H. Mowbray. During their research from 1950 to 1970, Fish and her colleagues maintained a hydrophone at the waterfront of the campus, with a cable from the hydrophone leading to the laboratory. If the timing was right, upon entering Fish’s laboratory, one would encounter the grunts, whistles, and toots of fish life from lower Narragansett Bay.

According to GSO Assistant Dean Kenneth Hinga, the original magnetic tapes were recently found in a storage vault where they had been tucked away some 30 years ago. Through the passage of time, memory of the tapes was lost. If not for a chance encounter with a former GSO acoustic group technician, Paul Perkins, Hinga said the tapes would probably still be sitting in the vault, safely forgotten.

The newly transcribed recordings are of high acoustic quality and faithfully reproduce the original recordings, which include the identification of each species. The recorded sounds range from the boat-whistle toots of the oyster toadfish to the teeth rasps and clicks of the parrotfishes to the ratchet sounds of the drums and croakers.

A few of their tunes can be sampled for free at the GSO website (http://www.gso.uri.edu/fishsounds/). The complete two-CD set can be purchased by mailing a check for $40, payable to the University of Rhode Island Foundation, to: Fish Sounds, Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, Narragansett, Rhode Island 02882.

By Jhodi Redlich