Life in the soil was thought to be silent – what if it isn’t?
knowablemagazine.org
knowablemagazine.org
It's amazing how much sound there is out there, hard thing is filtering out the rest and capturing those low dB sounds that are often drowned out.
Now with an array of microphones you could potentially track the movements of the target underground animal, but be some serious effort.
Basic balanced contact micrphone how to build https://www.instructables.com/Balanced-piezo-contact-microph...
Suggest adding sandwich layer that's non conductive but also good at picking up sound in the frequency range you are targeting - small shard of glass works nice, but again, it's a whole rabbit hole of exploration you may or may not wish to go down.
I can also recommend the behringer 202hd as a good preamp on a budget for such a balance contact microphone.
Or for something non balanced https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk/contact-microphones.php do top microphones and that model was used for many BBC Nature documentaries with David Attenborough. Though personally not used those myself.
The first time I heard it I was stunned just how loud it was.
Can you imagine being a sound deadening-engineer designing subs? Thats some impressive capability.
Recall the pic of the sub that collided with a (chinese) sub:
I'm not one to deep dive into sub design, but that looks like a lot of sound damping material to me...
I also watch anything and everything I can about subs, and the unofficial story was a chinese collision... A man can dream...
They claim it was a previously unmapped under-water land mass and the cover story was that it could have grown from the crust since the last time we mapped there....
This was in the south china sea correct? and we have seismic sensors everywhere, a lot in that region due to Indonesia's propensity to quake... (My brother is a COlonel - I don't take the official story regarding the military - and especially subs...
We haven’t come anywhere near mapping the entire ocean, and seamounts can pop up quite quickly. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/underwater-eruptio...
> In 2018, seismometers around the world detected mysterious rumbles emanating from a usually quiet area in the Indian Ocean between Comoros and Madagascar. At the time, researchers were astonished to find a 2,690-foot-tall underwater volcano, which is about 1.5 times the height of the One World Trade Center in New York.
As with most conspiracy theories, this one falls apart on even casual examination.
The speed of sound in air is ~340 m/s, in water ~1,430 m/s, and in steel ~5920 m/s.
Damn auto-correct.
I'm aware of some contact microphone recordings of ants, such as [1] and [2], but I'm talking about much more sensitive recordings.. for example, what is the sound of an ant's leg moving (not just its footstep).. or the sound of its internal organs? What does insect sex or feeding sound like? There are many thousands of different insect species, and each of them could sound different.
Just like electron microscopes have given us amazing views of insects that were unavailable to use through the naked eye, I suspect the soundscape on the microscopic level could be just as fascinating.
Musicians could also use it as raw material, and process it to make it even more interesting. The sky is the limit.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJa6apFGHBc
Another great example studies of mycelium networks exchanging nutrients with forest tree root networks. The exchange of nutrients has much in common with the firing of neutrons in the animal brain. This was discovered by "feeding" trees radioactive CO2 gas and observing how it moves to other trees. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mec.15520
The extreme case is compost, which is decay-dominated, and ends up full of thermophiles (not unlike wine ends up dominated by the yeast that made the wine). A number of people have figured out how to heat greenhouses, outbuildings, or in one case college dormitories by scaling this up.