Sea Life Hears More Than You
Beijing, China
2025, Senior, Interactive & Multimedia
Project Description: Sealife Hears More Than You is an immersive multimedia installation that places viewers inside the underwater world to experience sound pollution from a marine animal’s perspective. By revealing the hidden acoustic world beneath our oceans, my art piece explores how marine life demonstrates resilience against increasing sound pollution. Visitors enter a completely darkened space surrounded by four projection screens creating a 360-degree visual environment. They can move freely throughout the room as the installation unfolds around them. The experience begins with peaceful ocean visuals and whale songs created through TouchDesigner software and Logic Pro. Then, it gradually introduces the overwhelming industrial sounds that plague our oceans-ship engines, drilling, and sonar that can drive viewers to discomfort. The installation combines my original music composition, real-time audio-visual mapping technology, documentary footage, and expert interviews to create a visceral journey that transforms abstract environmental data into immediate physical experience. As viewers witness whales struggling against the visual chaos of sound waves projected on all four walls, they feel the same sensory overload that marine life endures daily. The piece concludes with educational content about real-world solutions, creating an empathetic bridge between human perception and marine animal experience. This multimedia approach integrates video art, sound design, interactive technology, and environmental storytelling. It seeks to demonstrate the impact of sound pollution, and transform our typical surface-level ocean experience into an empathetic understanding of underwater acoustics and marine life’s remarkable adaptability. First shown at Beijing Gulou “Shine More Realm Of Jade Digital Art Exhibition”, I intend this installation to be exhibited at more venues including my own campus to inspire ocean conservation awareness through direct sensory engagement.
Reflection
Living in Beijing, I have long noticed the noise from infrastructure, roads, car engines, and various other sources. Over time, I've grown so accustomed to these sounds that they've become an invisible backdrop to my days. It is only when I swim, going under water, although not the real ocean, that I find peace—the bubbles, the soft sound of my breath is the only thing I can hear, the muffled quiet world. Then I started wondering: what does the real ocean actually sound like to the animals living in it? That curiosity led me to BBC documentaries and research from news sources, where I discovered that deep in the ocean, marine life is severely disturbed by human-made sound pollution. What they experience is far louder and more chaotic than what we hear on the surface. I found myself thinking: if city noise wears me down, what must it feel like for creatures who can't escape it? The peaceful underwater world I imagined was actually full of sounds I'd never considered—both natural and increasingly, harmfully human-made. So, I came up with the idea to try to make the unheard heard. My creative process grew from the contrast between my daily life in Beijing and my curiosity about the underwater world. I wanted to create an artwork that could bridge these two experiences—the noise pollution I live with every day and the hidden acoustic world of the ocean that most people never get to hear. I realized that to make people truly understand the impact of sound pollution on marine life, I needed to make them feel it physically, not just understand it intellectually. So I designed an experience that starts peaceful and gradually becomes overwhelming, mirroring what happens to whales and dolphins when human noise invades their world. By immersing in the overwhelming sounds of city and ocean life, and learning about real-world solutions, I hope viewers feel empathy and urgency—enough to reflect, act, and perhaps even innovate new ways to help. My message is: our connection to nature starts from within, but only grows when we move outward, take responsibility, and join others in protecting our shared planet.