If a whale sings in the ocean, and Michelle Fournet is there to hear it through her hydrophones, how does it sound? How are these songs impacted by human activities—and by the pandemic’s quiet oceans?

Michelle Fournet is an acoustic ecologist with the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Program. She studies how marine animals—including humpback whales and other creatures—use sound to communicate, detect predators and prey, and engage with their environments in an increasingly noisy world. From Glacier Bay National Park in Southeast Alaska to Florida’s Everglades, she’s recorded hours and hours of sound from the underwater world.