One night in 1969, an anxious New Yorker named Irv Teibel discovered the perfect ocean. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t smell it, couldn’t dip his toes in it. But he could hear it, and the sound was all he needed.

Like a lot of searches, Teibel’s had started accidentally, when, earlier that year, a friend asked him to help record waves for a film project out on Coney Island. It was winter, freezing. The men rushed toward the shore and back with the tide, Teibel with a microphone in his hand and a tape player on his back. Even in the off-season, he found the beach loud, sleazy, nothing like the postcards promised.

Later, looping the tape in the editing room to sync with the film’s images, he noticed something: Normally while working with loops, he’d have to turn the volume down to stop the sound from driving him crazy, but this one didn’t bother him at all. In fact, the longer the loop played, the more relaxed Teibel felt. It was like finding a funny little rock on the side of the road, he said, only to take it out of your pocket later and realize it’s a diamond.

Teibel took his microphone back to the ocean in March, but the ocean didn’t comply. He walked 100 feet in either direction of where he first stood. He drove to Sandy Hook in New Jersey and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, eventually making his way down the Atlantic coast to Virginia, recording dozens of tapes along the way but never matching the sound rattling around his head.

Still, he persevered—perseverance was his way. He once said he drove Cadillacs because the NYPD didn’t have trucks big enough to tow them. When they did, he bought a bus.