Where do we go from here?

Soundwaves are just vibrations in the air.

Such a vast and strange environment.

As long as you have curiosity, you know there's life.

When I look out to the ocean,

I get that same feeling as I do when I look up into the stars.

Hearing my parents playing guitar,

that's probably my first memory.

As a kid I would run through the hallways

and I would hear them practising Mexican traditional music.

I went to a Catholic school, and the nun who had the Spanish class

always took students down to San Blas,

and that's where I met him.

And I was 15, and he was 16 years old.

Here we are at the plaza, La Plaza Principal.

Qué bonito.

My mum didn't know Spanish and my father didn't know English,

but they were able to communicate at least with music.

And then I came along.

Danny, he was a busy one.

Very inquisitive when he was little.

But his curiosity sometimes got him in trouble.

I was not a good student in high school. I didn't have any expectations,

I wasn't looking at universities or anything like that.

But after graduating I thought, well,

might as well go to community college.

I started at Cabrillo and I didn't know what engineering was.

As far as I was concerned, it was like a mechanic or something like that.

But I started taking some maths classes and it was different.

You know, there's lots of types of students.

The majority of the students, they want the equation

so that they could calculate a number.

And then there are students who actually try to understand.

That's Daniel.

I would always question things, I would always wonder,

how light works, why the waves are crashing the way they do.

And when you start looking at physics, and learning about

these soundwaves are just vibrations in the air,

and how we can represent those mathematically,

my eyes opened to a new world.

And that's, I think, when it clicked.

That I knew I wanted to do engineering.

Cabrillo College held a symposium,

where they connect students to research institutions.

It was really interesting what Danelle and John were doing.

Daniel had a musical background.

That's an important part of working on audio;

you have to have an understanding of the way sound works.

Light may reach a couple of hundred metres in the ocean.

Sound can travel thousands of miles.

It's not a surprise that many life forms use sound for communicating.

Blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived on earth,

including bigger than any dinosaur.

They vibrate your body, they're incredible to hear.

The scientists at MBARI wanted to figure out a way to listen in

and to count how many blue whales there were.

So, the process that we're using

involves recording audio from the ocean.

24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

But that's a lot of information;

too much information for a human to try to look at and listen to.

We were able to turn those sounds into spectrograms,

which are just images or mappings of what sound looks like.

And fed those images into TensorFlow, this machine-learning tool.

Machine learning is getting the computer

to be able to pick up patterns.

It allows us to take a mammoth pile of data

and distill it into something meaningful,

so that we can do the analysis.

We want to understand how and when they're using all these calls,

because that can help us understand their ecology.

We could answer a lot of questions about the way we are affecting

the marine environment and how we can help conserve it.

Daniel was key in developing the software

to automatically find the calls for us.

Daniel started with the artistry of sound,

and found a meeting place with the science of sound.

That note is this note here.

Ultimately, both of those experiences, they're from the same source.

That is sound energy varying in frequency through time.

That's what makes music,

and that is the signal we analyse.

The whales are communicating something to each other.

I don't know what it is, but it made me think about

how music is a way of communicating.

Just like going back to my parents and how they met each other.

They were doing the same thing.

When I was a kid, I didn't think I was going to be a scientist or engineer.

And especially as I grew up, I didn't think I was capable of doing it.

School was hard for me, and it still is hard for me.

I don't know if I've found my passion.

I find myself so interested in a lot of different things.

But knowing that I'll never stop learning,

makes me feel pretty lucky.