Abstract
Although underwater soundscapes of urban rivers are understudied, they can reveal urban and biological processes across multiple scales. We present a case study of the Charles River’s underwater soundscapes in Boston, Massachusetts. We approach underwater acoustic sensing as a method to attune to infrastructural, non-human, and environmental dynamics. Given that water is an ideal medium for sound propagation, the river becomes a magnifier for ignored aspects of the city, such as the urban infrastructure’s impact on the river's soundscape or aquatic fauna activity. In the sensing process, the river’s underwater environment becomes a space where human, more-than-human, environmental, and infrastructural actors converge, shaping what is audible and recordable. Based on fieldwork observations of organisms dwelling on the sensing device, we reflect on the device’s influence on the environment and speculate about possible sensor-organism interactions. This highlights underwater acoustic sensing as a method to produce data in interaction with the environment.
Keywords
Urban rivers, Underwater sound, Environmental data, Listening
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2397
Citation
Gonzalez Quintero, S., and Offenhuber, D. (2026) Occupying the sensors: Underwater sound in an urban river, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2397
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Occupying the sensors: Underwater sound in an urban river
Although underwater soundscapes of urban rivers are understudied, they can reveal urban and biological processes across multiple scales. We present a case study of the Charles River’s underwater soundscapes in Boston, Massachusetts. We approach underwater acoustic sensing as a method to attune to infrastructural, non-human, and environmental dynamics. Given that water is an ideal medium for sound propagation, the river becomes a magnifier for ignored aspects of the city, such as the urban infrastructure’s impact on the river's soundscape or aquatic fauna activity. In the sensing process, the river’s underwater environment becomes a space where human, more-than-human, environmental, and infrastructural actors converge, shaping what is audible and recordable. Based on fieldwork observations of organisms dwelling on the sensing device, we reflect on the device’s influence on the environment and speculate about possible sensor-organism interactions. This highlights underwater acoustic sensing as a method to produce data in interaction with the environment.