Interspecies Music
This six-minute audio excerpt showcases a dramatic interaction that ebbed and flowed over an entire day's time in September of 2001. The Pacific white-sided dolphins you hear crackling, clicking, stretching, and whistling were members of a pod of up to 300 animals gathered off the northern tip of Vancouver Island. The guitarist is Jim Nollman, working on the research vessel, Shelmar operated by videographer Bob Wood. The dolphins were accompanied by three humpback whales, as well as a band of Stellar sea lions that occasionally drew close to listen to the interaction.

This recording has been edited to include some of the best interactions that occurred during several hours of recording. We used a bit of crossfading, equalization and gain balancing to make the piece into a contiguous whole, Otherwise, the recording you hear remains quite accurate to the realtime interaction that occurred that day. Several times, members of the pod draw so close the boat, that they could be seen vocalizing right at the speaker, striking the hydrophone in the process. We'll eventually place some streaming video of the dolphins circling the speaker up on this page to accompany the sound. You can watch this event unfold on the Interspecies DVD.

This .mp3 file is over 3 megabytes, so give it a while to download.