The mp3s:

Here’s my slowed down version of The Bloop. You won’t be able to hear it with tiny little computer speakers. Either find a subwoofer or some nice over the ear headphones and crank the Cthulu Bloop:

Background:

The other day there was an article on Reddit about “The Bloop”–A weird sound captured by underwater hydrophone arrays in the middle of the ocean. On top of that, the sound was caught near the place from which Chtulu is rumored to emerge. Here is the wikipedia article about The Bloop. The sound posted there is a edited down version of The Bloop from the NOAA’s site.

Fine so far. But I noticed that on both wikipedia and the NOAA site they say that the sound is sped up 16x. So I wanted to hear what it sounded like in realtime. I slowed it down with audacity (which turned out to harder than it should have been), and reveled in the deep bass.

Today I saw another link on Reddit to someone who had done the same thing. I checked out their real-time sound and it didn’t sound at all like mine. I realized that they used a pitch shifting style effect to slow the sound down without changing its pitch. When you slow something down that much it introduces a lot of artifacts, which are clearly audible in their file. In order to attempt to fix that they have another version that’s been run through some sort of noise reduction filter which causes even more bloopy (so to speak) artifacts.

If you check the original spectrogram on the NOAA’s site it looks like this:

Notice that the top frequency there is 50Hz. That is low. We’re talking deep bass. So I’m pretty sure the correct way to slow it down is to actually just slow it down and let the frequency drop all the way down.