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Capturing 3D Audio Underwater
Listen up divers! Audio engineer turned techie, Symeon Manias is bringing 3D audio to the underwater world to provide a more immersive and convincing auditory experience to listeners whether its video, film, or virtual reality. So, pump up the volume—here’s what you need to know.
by Symeon Manias
Header image by Peter Gaertner/Symeon Manias and edited by Amanda White
Spatial hearing provides sound related information about the world. Where does a sound come from? How far away is it? In what space does the sound reside? Humans are pretty good at localizing sound sources and making sense of the world of sounds. The human auditory system performs localization tasks either by solely relying on auditory cues or by fusing them with visual, dynamic, or experience-based cues. Auditory cues consist of cues obtained by one ear, which is termed monaural, or by using both ears, termed binaural.
Humans can detect sounds of frequency content between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. That translates to wavelengths between 1.7 cm and 17 m. This frequency range decreases with age as the internal parts of the ear degrade; however, exposure to loud noises can accelerate this degradation. The peripheral part of each of the human ears, which by no coincidence is common to most mammals, consists of three structures. The external part of the ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. Figure 1 shows in detail all these parts of the ear along with their basic structure
Courtesy of Evangelos Pantazis.
The external ear consists mainly of the pinna, the concha, and the ear canal and ends at the eardrum. The pinna and concha, which are visible as the outer part of the ear, are responsible for modifying the frequency spectrum of sounds coming from different directions. The ear canal, on the other hand, is responsible for enhancing specific frequencies of most incoming sounds. The ear canal can be seen as a resonant tube with a resonant frequency that depends on the length and diameter of the tube. For most humans, the resonant frequency of the ear canal is between 2 kHz and 4 kHz. This means that all sounds that travel through the ear canal will be enhanced in that frequency range. Airborne sounds travel from the world through the pinna, the concha, the ear canal, and hit the eardrum, which is at the end of the ear canal. The eardrum separates the outer from the middle ear and acts as a transformer that converts sounds to mechanical vibration.
On the other side of the eardrum, in the middle ear, there are three ossicles, the malleus, the incus and the stapes. These bones are responsible for transmitting the sounds from the outer ear through vibration to the entrance of the inner ear at the oval window. This is where mechanical vibration is transformed into sound to then be received by the sound receptors in the middle ear.
One might wonder why we even need the middle ear if the incoming sound is first transformed at the eardrum into mechanical vibration and then back to sound at the oval window. If the middle ear was absent, it is very likely that incoming sound would be reflected back at the eardrum. Another reason is that the middle ear generally acts as a dynamics processor; it has a protection functionality. When a loud sound travels through the ear canal and hits the eardrum, the muscles that are attached to the middle ear ossicles can attenuate the mechanical vibration. This is a phenomenon known in psychoacoustics as an acoustics reflex. The middle ear also serves as a means to reduce the transmission of internally generated sounds that are transmitted through bone conduction, as well as letting air be transmitted on the back side of the eardrum through the Eustachian tube, which balances the pressure that is building on the eardrum.
The inner ear is a very complex structure which is responsible for two functions: one is the vestibular system, which is responsible for our orientation and balance in the three-dimensional world, and the other is the cochlea, which is dedicated to sound perception. The cochlea, which looks like a hard shell, is essentially a hard bone filled with fluid and consisting of rigid walls which continue like a spiral with decreasing diameter. Sounds enter the cochlea through the oval window and cause the liquid inside the cochlea to begin to ripple, and that’s where the magic happens.
There are two membranes inside the cochlea, the vestibular membrane, which separates the cochlear duct from the vestibular duct, and the basilar membrane. The basilar membrane is where the organ of Corti resides; this area consists of two sets of sensory receptors, named hair cells, and these are the inner and outer cells. The inner hair cells, which move as the incoming sound waves travel through the cochlear fluid, act as transducers that transform the motion into neural spike activity that is then sent to the auditory nerve.
The outer hair cells can influence the overall sensitivity of each perceived sound. The neural spikes that travel through the auditory nerve are then received by the brain and are interpreted as sounds that we know and can understand. Different sections of the basilar membrane inside the cochlea are responsible for interpreting different frequencies of sound. The section near the entrance consists of hair cells that are responsible for the interpretation of high pitched sounds and, as we move further inside the cochlea, detect progressively lower pitched sounds.
Sound Source Localization
A single ear is basically a frequency analyzer that can provide information to the brain about the pitch of a sound with some dynamics processing that can protect us from loud sounds and some basic filtering of a sound that comes from different directions. So what can we do with two ears that it is almost impossible to do with one? Two ears can provide information about another dimension—the direction—and consequently can give us an estimate of the location of a sound. This is termed spatial hearing. The main theories about how spatial hearing works developed around the idea of how we localize sounds with two ears and get information about the environment in which they reside.
The human auditory system deploys an assortment of localization cues to determine the location of a sound event. The underlying human localization theory is that the main auditory cues that assist with localization are the time and level difference between the two ears and the shape of the ear itself. The most prominent auditory cues use both ears for determining the direction of a sound source and are called binaural cues. These cues measure the time difference of a sound arriving in the two ears, named as interaural time difference (ITD), and cues that track the level difference between the two ears, named as interaural intensity difference (IID). Sound arrives at different times between the two ears and the time delay can be up to approximately 0.7 milliseconds (ms). ITD is meaningful for frequencies up to approximately 1.5 kHz, while ILD provides meaning for frequencies above 1.5 kHz. See Figure 2 for a visual explanation of the ITD and ILD.
ITD and IID alone cannot adequately describe the sound localization process. Imagine a sound coming from directly in front vs the same sound coming directly from the back. ITD and IID provide the exact same values for both ears since their distance from the sound is exactly the same. This is true for all sounds that are on the median plane, which is the plane defined from the points directly in front of us, then up and then back. This is where monaural cues play a role. These are generated by the pinna, diffraction, and reflections of our torso and head. The frequencies of sounds coming from our back or on top of our head will be attenuated differently than sounds coming from front. Another set of cues are dynamic cues which are generated by moving our head. These can show the effect of our head movement to ITD and IID. Last but not least, visual and experience-based cues play an important role as well. Our visual cues, when available, fuse information with auditory cues and resolve to more accurate source localization.
Localizing Sound Underwater
If, under certain conditions, humans can localize a sound source with accuracy as high as 1 degree in the horizontal plane, what makes it so difficult to understand where sounds are coming from when we are underwater? The story of sound perception becomes very different underwater. When we are submerged the localization abilities of the auditory systems degrade significantly. The factor that has the biggest impact when we enter the water is the speed of sound. The speed of sound in air is approximately 343 m/s, while underwater it is 1480 m/s and depends mainly on temperature, salinity etc. A speed of sound that is more than 4x higher than the speed of sound in air will result in sound arriving in our ear with much smaller time differences, which could possibly diminish or even eliminate completely our spatial hearing abilities.
The perception of time differences is not the only cue that is affected; the perception of interaural intensity differences is also affected by the fact that there is very little mechanical impedance mismatch between water and our head. In air, our head acts as an acoustic barrier that attenuates high frequencies due to shadowing effect. Underwater sound most likely travels directly through our head since the impedances of water and our head are very similar. and the head is acoustically transparent. These factors might suggest that underwater, humans could be considered as a one-eared mammal.
In principle, the auditory system performs very poorly underwater. On the other hand, there have been studies and early reports by divers that suggest that some primitive type of localization can be achieved underwater. In a very limited study that aimed to determine the minimum audible angle, divers were instructed to perform a left-right discrimination and were able to improve their ability when they were given feedback on their performance.
Another study was conducted where various underwater projectors were placed at 0, +/-45 and +/-90 degrees at ear level in the horizontal plane with 0 degrees being in front of the diver in [5]. The stimuli consisted of pure tones and noise. The results indicated that divers could perform enough localization that it could not be written off as coincidence or chance. It is not entirely clear whether the underwater localization ability is something that humans can learn and adapt or if it’s a limitation of the human auditory system itself.
Assistive Technologies for Sound Recording
In a perfect world, humans could perform localization tasks underwater as accurately as they could in air. Until that day, should it ever come, we can use assistive technologies to sense the underwater sound environment. Assistive technologies can be exploited for two main applications of 3D audio underwater: localization of sound and sound recording. Sound sensing with microphones is a well developed topic, especially nowadays since the cost of building devices with multiple microphones has decreased dramatically. Multi-microphone devices can be found everywhere in our daily life from portable devices to cars. These devices use multiple microphones to make sense of the world and deliver to the user improved sensing abilities but also the ability to capture the sounds with great accuracy.
The aim of 3D audio is to provide an immersive, appealing, and convincing auditory experience to a listener. This can be achieved by delivering the appropriate spatial cues using a reproduction system that consists of either headphones or loudspeakers. There are quite a few techniques regarding 3D audio localization and 3D audio recording that one can exploit for an immersive experience. Traditionally, recording relies on a small number of sensors that are either played back directly to the loudspeaker or are mixed linearly and then fed to loudspeakers. The main idea here is that if we can approximate the binaural cues, we can trick the human auditory system into thinking that sounds come from specific directions and give the impression of being there.
One of the earliest approaches in the microphone domain was a stereophonic technique invented by Blumlein in Bell Labs [6]. Although this technique was invented in the beginning of the last century, it took many decades to actually commercialize it. From there on, many different stereophonic techniques were utilized that aimed at approximating the desired time and level differences to be delivered to the listener. This was performed by changing the distance between the sensors or by placing directional sensors really close together, and delivering the directional cues by exploiting the directivity of the sensors. The transition from stereophonic to surround systems came right after by using multiple sensors for capturing sounds and multiple loudspeakers for playback. These are, for example, the traditional microphone arrangements we can see on top of an orchestra playing in a hall.
A more advanced technology that existed since the 1970s is called Ambisonics. It consists of a unified generalized approach to the recording, analysis, and reproduction of any recorded sound field. It utilized a standard microphone recording setup with four sensors placed almost in a coincident manner on the tetrahedral arrangement. This method provided great flexibility in terms of playback: once the audio signals are recorded they can be played back in any type of output setup, such as a stereophonic pair of loudspeakers, a surround setup, or plain headphones. The mathematical background of this technique is based on solving the acoustic wave equation, and for a non-expert this can become an inconvenience to use in practice.
Fortunately, there are tools that make this process straightforward for the non-expert. In practical terms, this technology is based on recording signals from various sensors and then combining them to obtain a new set of audio signals, called ambisonic signals. The requirement for acquiring optimal ambisonic signals is to record the signals with sensors placed on the surface of a sphere for practical and theoretical convenience. The process is based on sampling the sound field pressure over a surface or volume around the origin. The accuracy of the sampling depends on the array geometry, the number of sensors, and the distance between the sensors. The encoded ambisonic signals can then accurately describe the sound field.
By using ambisonic signals, one can approximate the pressure and particle velocity of the sound field at the point where the sensors are located. By estimating these two quantities we can then perform an energetic analysis of the sound field and estimate the direction of a sound by using the active intensity vector. The active intensity vector points to the direction of the energy flow in a sound field. The opposite of that direction will point exactly where the energy is coming from, therefore it will show the direction of arrival. A generic view of such a system is shown in Figure 3. For more technical details on how an three-dimensional sound processor works the reader is referred to [3,7].
For underwater audio-related applications, a similar sensor is used, namely the hydrophone. The signal processing principles that can be used underwater are very similar to the ones used with microphones. However, the applications are not as widely spread. Multiple hydrophones, namely hydrophone arrays, have been utilized for localization tasks, but many of them are based on classical theories that require the hydrophones to be very far apart from each other. Therefore, compact, wearable devices are uncommon. A compact hydrophone array that can be carried by a single diver can serve multiple purposes: it can operate as a localization device that can locate quite accurately where sounds are originating from, and it can also capture the sounds with spatial accuracy that can later be played back and give the experience of being there. This can be especially useful for people that do not have the chance to experience the underwater world at all or listen to the sounds of highly inaccessible places where diving is only for highly-skilled technical divers.
A purposefully built compact hydrophone array which can be operated by a diver and that can perform simultaneously a localization task but also record spatial audio that can be later played through a pair of headphones, is shown in a recently published article as a proof of concept. It is suggested that a simple set of four hydrophone sensors can be exploited in real-time to identify the direction of underwater sound objects with relatively high accuracy, both visually and aurally.
Underwater sound localization is not a new technology, but the ability to do such tasks with compact hydrophone arrays where the hydrophones are closely spaced together has the potential for many applications. The hydrophone array used in the study discussed above, was an open-body hydrophone array, consisting of four sensors placed at the vertices of a tetrahedral frame. A photo of the hydrophone array is shown in Figure 4. More technical details on the hydrophone array can be found in the following publication [2]. The hydrophone array was used to provide a visualization of the sound field. The sound-field visualization is basically a sound activity map where the relative energy for many directions is depicted using a color gradient like in Figure 5. These experiments were performed in a diving pool.
The depth of the hydrophone array was fixed by attaching it to the end of a metal rod, which was made out of a three-piece aluminum tube. The hydrophone array signals were recorded and processed in real time with a set of virtual instrument plugins. The observer, a single action camera in this case, was able to clearly track the movements of the diver from the perspective of the array, both visually and aurally. The diver from the perspective of the array and the corresponding activity map are both shown in Figure 5. A video demonstrating the tracking and headphone rendering with a diver inside the swimming pool can be found here.
This example has been utilized as a proof of concept that compact arrays can be indeed exploited by divers simultaneously for sound visualization and accurate three-dimensional sound recording. In the examples shown, the sound arrives at the hydrophone array and then the user can visually see the location of sound and simultaneously listen to the acoustic field. The three-dimensional audio cues are delivered accurately and the sound sources are represented to the user in their correct spatial location so the user can accurately localize them.
3D Video Recording
The current state of the art in 3D video recording underwater usually captures the audio with the microphones built into the cameras. Although sounds are often recorded in this way, the recorded sound through built-in microphones inside a casing cannot capture underwater sounds accurately. The development of a relatively compact hydrophone array such as the one demonstrated could potentially enhance the audio-visual experience by providing accurate audio rendering of the recorded sound scene. Visuals and specific 3D video recordings can be pretty impressive by themselves, but the addition of an accompanying 3D audio component can potentially enhance the experience.
Visuals and specific 3D video recordings can be pretty impressive by themselves, but the addition of an accompanying 3D audio component can potentially enhance the experience.
Ambisonic technologies are a great candidate for such an application since the underwater sound field can be easily recorded with an ambisonic hydrophone array (such as the one shown in Figure 4) and can be mounted near or within the 3D camera system. Ambisonics aim at a complete reconstruction of the physical sound scene. Once the sound scene is recorded and transformed in the ambisonic format, a series of additional spatial transformations/manipulation can come handy. Ambisonics allow straightforward manipulation of the recorded sound scene, such as a rotation of the whole sound field to arbitrary directions, mirroring of the sound field to any axis, direction-dependent manipulation such as focusing on different directions or areas, or even warping of the whole sound field. The quality of the reproduced sound scene and accuracy of all the sound scene manipulation techniques highly depends on the number of sensors involved in the recording.
Some modern, state-of-the art techniques are based on the same recording principle, but they can provide an enhanced audio experience by using a low number of sensors that exploit human hearing abilities as well as advanced statistical signal processing techniques. These techniques aim to imitate the way human hearing works, and by processing the sounds in time, frequency, and space, they deliver the necessary spatial cues for an engaging aural experience, which is usually perceived as very close to reality. They exploit the limitations of the human auditory system and analyze only the properties of the sound scene that are meaningful to a human listener. Once the sound scene is recorded and analyzed into the frequency content of different sounds, it can then be manipulated and synthesized for playback [7].
Dive Deeper
- [1] Delikaris Manias, Symeon, Leo McCormack, Ilkka Huhtakallio, and Ville Pulkki. “Real-time underwater spatial audio: a feasibility study.” Audio Engineering Society, 2018.
- [2] Spatial Audio Real-Time Applications (SPARTA).
- [3] Gerzon, Michael A. “Periphony: With-height sound reproduction.” Journal of the audio engineering society, 1973.
- [4] Feinstein, Stephen H. “Acuity of the human sound localization response underwater.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 1973.
- [5] Hollien, Harry. “Underwater sound localization in humans.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1973
- [6] A. D. Blumlein. British patent specification 394,325 (improvements in and relating to sound-transmission, sound-recording and sound-reproducing systems). Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 6(2):91–130, 1958.
- [7] Pulkki, Ville, Delikaris Manias Symeon, and Politis Archontis. Parametric time-frequency domain spatial audio , John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
Dr. Symeon Manias has worked in the field of spatial audio since 2008. He has received awards from the Audio Engineering Society, the Nokia Foundation, the Foundation of Aalto Science and Technology, and the International College of the European University of Brittany. He is an editor and author of the first parametric spatial audio book from Wiley and IEEE Press. Manias can be usually found diving through the kelp forests of Southern California.
Contact: symewn@gmail.com
Community
Twenty-five Years in the Pursuit of Excellence – The Evolution and Future of GUE
Founder and president Jarrod Jablonski describes his more than a quarter of a century long quest to promote excellence in technical diving.
by Jarrod Jablonski. Images courtesy of J. Jablonski and GUE unless noted.
The most difficult challenges we confront in our lives are the most formative and are instrumental in shaping the person we become. When I founded Global Underwater Explorers (GUE), the younger version of myself could not have foreseen all the challenges I would face, but equally true is that he would not have known the joy, the cherished relationships, the sense of purpose, the rich adventures, the humbling expressions of appreciation from those impacted, or the satisfaction of seeing the organization evolve and reshape our industry. Many kindred souls and extraordinary events have shaped these last 25 years, and an annotated chronology of GUE is included in this issue of InDEPTH. This timeline, however, will fail to capture the heart behind the creation of GUE, it will miss the passionate determination currently directing GUE, or the committed dedication ready to guide the next 25 years.
I don’t remember a time that I was not in, around, and under the water. Having learned to swim before I could walk, my mother helped infuse a deep connection to the aquatic world. I was scuba certified in South Florida with my father, and promptly took all our gear to North Florida where I became a dive instructor at the University of Florida. It was then that I began my infatuation with cave diving. I was in the perfect place for it, and my insatiable curiosity was multiplied while exploring new environments. I found myself with a strong desire to visit unique and hard-to-reach places, be they far inside a cave or deep within the ocean.
My enthusiasm for learning was pressed into service as an educator, and I became enamored with sharing these special environments. Along with this desire to share the beauty and uniqueness of underwater caves was a focused wish to assist people in acquiring the skills I could see they needed to support their personal diving goals. It could be said that these early experiences were the seeds that would germinate, grow, mature, and bloom into the organizing principles for GUE.
The Pre-GUE Years
Before jumping into the formational days of GUE, allow me to help you visualize the environment that was the incubator for the idea that became GUE’s reality. By the mid-1990s, I was deeply involved in a variety of exploration activities and had been striving to refine my own teaching capacity alongside this growing obsession for exploratory diving. While teaching my open water students, I was in the habit of practicing to refine my own trim and buoyancy, noticing that the students quickly progressed and were mostly able to copy my position in the water. Rather than jump immediately into the skills that were prescribed, I started to take more time to refine their comfort and general competency. This subtle shift made a world of difference in the training outcomes, creating impressive divers with only slightly more time and a shift in focus. In fact, the local dive boats would often stare in disbelief when told these divers were freshly certified, saying they looked better than most open water instructors!
By this point in my career, I could see the problems I was confronting were more systemic and less individualistic. In retrospect, it seemed obvious that key principles had been missing in both my recreational and technical education, not to mention the instructor training I received. The lack of basic skill refinement seemed to occur at all levels of training, from the beginner to the advanced diver. Core skills like buoyancy or in-water control were mainly left for divers to figure out on their own and almost nobody had a meaningful emphasis on efficient movement in the water. It was nearly unheard of to fail people in scuba diving, and even delaying certification for people with weak skills was very unusual. This remains all too common to this day, but I believe GUE has shifted the focus in important ways, encouraging people to think of certification more as a process and less as a right granted to them because they paid for training.
The weakness in skill refinement during dive training was further amplified by little-to-no training in how to handle problems when they developed while diving, as they always do. In those days, even technical/cave training had very little in the way of realistic training in problem resolution. The rare practice of failures was deeply disconnected from reality. For example, there was almost no realistic scenario training for things like a failed regulator or light. What little practice there was wasn’t integrated into the actual dive and seemed largely useless in preparing for real problems. I began testing some of my students with mock equipment failures, and I was shocked at how poorly even the best students performed. They were able to quickly develop the needed skills, but seeing how badly most handled their first attempts left me troubled about the response of most certified divers should they experience problems while diving, as they inevitably would.
Diving Fatalities
Meanwhile, I was surrounded by a continual progression of diving fatalities, and most appeared entirely preventable. The loss of dear friends and close associates had a deep impact on my view of dive training and especially on the procedures being emphasized at that time within the community. The industry, in those early days, was wholly focused on deep air and solo diving. However, alarmingly lacking were clear bottle marking or gas switching protocols. It seemed to me to be no coincidence that diver after diver lost their lives simply because they breathed the wrong bottle at depth. Many others died mysteriously during solo dives or while deep diving with air.
One of the more impactful fatalities was Bob McGuire, who was a drill sergeant, friend, and occasional dive buddy. He was normally very careful and focused. One day a small problem with one regulator caused him to switch regulators before getting in the water. He was using a system that used color-coded regulators to identify the gas breathed. When switching the broken regulator, he either did not remember or did not have an appropriately colored regulator. This small mistake cost him his life. I clearly remember turning that one around in my head quite a bit. Something that trivial should not result in the loss of a life.
Also disturbing was the double fatality of good friends, Chris and Chrissy Rouse, who lost their lives while diving a German U-boat in 70 m/230 ft of water off the coast of New Jersey. I remember, as if the conversation with Chris were yesterday, asking him not to use air and even offering to support the cost as a counter to his argument about the cost of helium. And the tragedies continued: The loss of one of my closest friends Sherwood Schille, the death of my friend Steve Berman who lived next to me and with whom I had dived hundreds of times, the shock of losing pioneering explorer Sheck Exley, the regular stream of tech divers, and the half dozen body recoveries I made over only a couple years, which not only saddened me greatly, but also made me angry. Clearly, a radically different approach was needed.
Learning to Explore
Meanwhile, my own exploration activities were expanding rapidly. Our teams were seeking every opportunity to grow their capability while reducing unnecessary risk. To that end, we ceased deep air diving and instituted a series of common protocols with standardized equipment configurations, both of which showed great promise in expanding safety, efficiency, and comfort. We got a lot of things wrong and experienced enough near misses to keep us sharp and in search of continual improvement.
But we looked carefully at every aspect of our diving, seeking ways to advance safety, efficiency, and all-around competency while focusing plenty of attention into the uncommon practice of large-scale, team diving, utilizing setup dives, safety divers, and inwater support. We developed diver propulsion vehicle (DPV) towing techniques, which is something that had not been done previously. We mostly ignored and then rewrote CNS oxygen toxicity calculations, developed novel strategies for calculating decompression time, and created and refined standard procedures for everything from bottle switching to equipment configurations. Many of these developments arose from simple necessity. There were no available decompression programs and no decompression tables available for the dives we were doing. Commonly used calculations designed to reduce the risk of oxygen toxicity were useless to our teams, because even our more casual dives were 10, 20, or even 30 times the allowable limit. The industry today takes most of this for granted, but in the early days of technical diving, we had very few tools, save a deep motivation to go where no one had gone before.
Many of these adventures included friends in the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP), where I refined policies within the team and most directly with longtime dive buddy George Irvine. This “Doing it Right” (DIR) approach sought to create a more expansive system than Hogarthian diving, which itself had been born in the early years of the WKPP and was named after William Hogarth Main, a friend and frequent dive buddy of the time. By this point, I had been writing about and expanding upon Hogarthian diving for many years. More and more of the ideas we wanted to develop were not Bill Main’s priorities and lumping them into his namesake became impractical, especially given all the debate within the community over what was and was not Hogarthian.
A similar move from DIR occurred some years later when GUE stepped away from the circular debates that sought to explain DIR and embraced a GUE configuration with standard protocols, something entirely within our scope to define.
These accumulating events reached critical mass in 1998. I had experienced strong resistance to any form of standardization, even having been asked to join a special meeting of the board of directors (BOD) for a prominent cave diving agency. Their intention was to discourage me from using any form of standard configuration, claiming that students should be allowed to do whatever they “felt’ was best. It was disconcerting for me, as a young instructor, to be challenged by pioneers in the sport; nevertheless, I couldn’t agree with the edict that someone who was doing something for the first time should be tasked with determining how it should be done.
This sort of discussion was common, but the final straw occurred when I was approached by the head of a technical diving agency, an organization for which I had taught for many years. I was informed that he considered it a violation of standards not to teach air to a depth of at least 57 m/190 ft. This same individual told me that I had to stop using MOD bottle markings and fall in line with the other practices endorsed by his agency. Push had finally come to shove, and I set out to legitimize the training methods and dive protocols that had been incubating in my mind and refined with our teams over the previous decade. Years of trial and many errors while operating in dynamic and challenging environments were helping us to identify what practices were most successful in support of excellence, safety, and enjoyment.
Forming GUE
Forming GUE as a non-profit company was intended to neutralize the profit motivations that appeared to plague other agencies. We hoped to remove the incentive to train—and certify—the greatest number of divers as quickly as possible because it seemed at odds with ensuring comfortable and capable divers. The absence of a profit motive complemented the aspirational plans that longtime friend Todd Kincaid and I had dreamed of. We imagined a global organization that would facilitate the efforts of underwater explorers while supporting scientific research and conservation initiatives.
I hoped to create an agency that placed most of the revenue in the hands of fully engaged and enthusiastic instructors, allowing them the chance to earn a good living and become professionals who might stay within the industry over many years. Of course, that required forgoing the personal benefit of ownership and reduced the revenue available to the agency, braking its growth and complicating expansion plans. This not only slowed growth but provided huge challenges in developing a proper support network while creating the agency I envisioned. There were years of stressful days and nights because of the need to forgo compensation and the deep dependance upon generous volunteers who had to fit GUE into their busy lives. If it were not for these individuals and our loyal members, we would likely never have been successful. Volunteer support and GUE membership have been and remain critical to the growing success of our agency. If you are now or have ever been a volunteer or GUE member, your contribution is a significant part of our success, and we thank you.
The challenges of the early years gave way to steady progress—always slower than desired, with ups and downs, but progress, nonetheless. Some challenges were not obvious at the outset. For example, many regions around the world were very poorly developed in technical diving. Agencies intent on growth seemed to ignore that problem, choosing whoever was available, and regardless of their experience in the discipline, they would soon be teaching.
This decision to promote people with limited experience became especially problematic when it came to Instructor Trainers. People with almost no experience in something like trimix diving were qualifying trimix instructors. Watching this play out in agency after agency, and on continent after continent, was a troubling affair. Conversely, it took many years for GUE to develop and train people of appropriate experience, especially when looking to critical roles, including high-level tech and instructor trainers. At the same time, GUE’s efforts shaped the industry in no small fashion as agencies began to model their programs after GUE’s training protocols. Initially, having insisted that nobody would take something like Fundamentals, every agency followed suit in developing their own version of these programs, usually taught by divers that had followed GUE training.
This evolving trend wasn’t without complexity but was largely a positive outcome. Agencies soon focused on fundamental skills, incorporated some form of problem-resolution training, adhered to GUE bottle and gas switching protocols, reduced insistence on deep air, and started talking more about developing skilled divers, among other changes. This evolution was significant when compared to the days of arguing about why a person could not learn to use trimix until they were good while diving deep on air.
To be sure, a good share of these changes was more about maintaining business relevance than making substantive improvements. The changes themselves were often more style than substance, lacking objective performance standards and the appropriate retraining of instructors. Despite these weaknesses, they remain positive developments. Talking about something is an important first step and, in all cases, it makes room for strong instructors in any given agency to practice what is being preached. In fact, these evolving trends have allowed GUE to now push further in the effort to create skilled and experienced divers, enhancing our ability to run progressively more elaborate projects with increasingly more sophisticated outcomes.
The Future of GUE
The coming decades of GUE’s future appear very bright. Slow but steady growth has now placed the organization in a position to make wise investments, ensuring a vibrant and integrated approach. Meanwhile, evolving technology and a broad global base place GUE in a unique and formidable position. Key structural and personnel adjustments complement a growing range of virtual tools, enabling our diverse communities and representatives to collaborate and advance projects in a way that, prior to now, was not possible. Strong local communities can be easily connected with coordinated global missions; these activities include ever-more- sophisticated underwater initiatives as well as structural changes within the GUE ecosystem. One such forward-thinking project leverages AI-enabled, adaptive learning platforms to enhance both the quality and efficiency of GUE education. Most agencies, including GUE, have been using some form of online training for years, but GUE is taking big steps to reinvent the quality and efficiency of this form of training. This is not to replace, but rather to extend and augment inwater and in-person learning outcomes. Related tools further improve the fluidity, allowing GUE to seamlessly connect previously distant communities, enabling technology, training, and passion to notably expand our ability to realize our broad, global mission.
Meanwhile, GUE and its range of global communities are utilizing evolving technologies to significantly expand the quality and scope of their project initiatives. Comparing the impressive capability of current GUE communities with those of our early years shows a radical and important shift, allowing results equal or even well beyond those possible when compared even with well-funded commercial projects. Coupled with GUE training and procedural support, these ongoing augmentations place our communities at the forefront of underwater research and conservation. This situation will only expand and be further enriched with the use of evolving technology and closely linked communities. Recent and planned expansions to our training programs present a host of important tools that will continue being refined in the years to come. Efforts to expand and improve upon the support provided to GUE projects with technology, people, and resources are now coming online and will undoubtedly be an important part of our evolving future.
The coming decades will undoubtedly present challenges. But I have no doubt that together we will not only overcome those obstacles but we will continue to thrive. I believe that GUE’s trajectory remains overwhelmingly positive, for we are an organization that is continually evolving—driven by a spirit of adventure, encouraged by your heartwarming stories, and inspired by the satisfaction of overcoming complex problems. Twenty-five years ago, when I took the path less traveled, the vision I had for GUE was admittedly ambitious. The reality, however, has exceeded anything I could have imagined. I know that GUE will never reach a point when it is complete but that it will be an exciting lifelong journey, one that, for me, will define a life well lived. I look forward our mutual ongoing “Quest for Excellence.”
See Listings Below For Additional Resources On GUE And GUE Diving!
Jarrod is an avid explorer, researcher, author, and instructor who teaches and dives in oceans and caves around the world. Trained as a geologist, Jarrod is the founder and president of GUE and CEO of Halcyon and Extreme Exposure while remaining active in conservation, exploration, and filming projects worldwide. His explorations regularly place him in the most remote locations in the world, including numerous world record cave dives with total immersions near 30 hours. Jarrod is also an author with dozens of publications, including three books.
A Few GUE Fundamentals
Similar to military, commercial and public safety divers, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) is a standards-based diving community, with specific protocols, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and tools. Here are selected InDEPTH stories on some of the key aspects of GUE diving, including a four-part series on the history and development of GUE decompression procedures by founder and president Jarod Jablonski.
Anatomy of a Fundamentals Class
GUE Instructor Examiner Guy Shockey explains the thought and details that goes into GUE’s most popular course, Fundamentals, aka “Fundies,” which has been taken by numerous industry luminaries. Why all the fanfare? Shockey characterizes the magic as “simple things done precisely!
Back to Fundamentals: An Introduction to GUE’s Most Popular Diving Course
Instructor evaluator Rich Walker attempts to answer the question, “why is Fundamentals GUE’s most popular diving course?” Along the way, he clarifies some of the myths and misconceptions about GUE training. Hint: there is no Kool-Aid.
As you’d expect, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) has a standardized approach to prepare your equipment for the dive, and its own pre-dive checklist: the GUE EDGE. Here explorer and filmmaker Dimitris Fifis preps you to take the plunge, GUE-style.
The Flexibility of Standard Operating Procedures
Instructor trainer Guy Shockey discusses the purpose, value, and yes, flexibility of standard operating procedures, or SOPs, in diving. Sound like an oxymoron? Shockey explains how SOPs can help offload some of our internal processing and situational awareness, so we can focus on the important part of the dive—having FUN!
Standard Gases: The Simplicity of Everyone Singing the Same Song
Like the military and commercial diving communities before them, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) uses standardized breathing mixtures for various depth ranges and for decompression. Here British wrecker and instructor evaluator Rich Walker gets lyrical and presents the reasoning behind standard mixes and their advantages, compared with a “best mix” approach. Don’t worry, you won’t need your hymnal, though Walker may have you singing some blues.
Rules of Thumb: The Mysteries of Ratio Deco Revealed
Is it a secret algorithm developed by the WKPP to get you out of the water faster sans DCI, or an unsubstantiated decompression speculation promoted by Kool-Aid swilling quacks and charlatans? British tech instructor/instructor evaluator Rich Walker divulges the arcane mysteries behind GUE’s ratio decompression protocols in this first of a two part series.
The Thought Process Behind GUE’s CCR Configuration
Global Underwater Explorers is known for taking its own holistic approach to gear configuration. Here GUE board member and Instructor Trainer Richard Lundgren explains the reasoning behind its unique closed-circuit rebreather configuration. It’s all about the gas!
GUE and the Future of Open Circuit Tech Diving
Though they were late to the party, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) is leaning forward on rebreathers, and members are following suit. So what’s to become of their open circuit-based TECH 2 course? InDepth’s Ashley Stewart has the deets.
Diving projects, or expeditions—think Bill Stone’s Wakulla Springs 1987 project, or the original explorations of the Woodville Karst Plain’s Project (WKPP)—helped give birth to technical diving, and today continue as an important focal point and organizing principle for communities like Global Underwater Explorers (GUE). The organization this year unveiled a new Project Diver program, intended to elevate “community-led project dives to an entirely new level of sophistication.” Here, authors Guy Shockey and Francesco Cameli discuss the power of projects and take us behind the scenes of the new program
Decompression, Deep Stops and the Pursuit of Precision in a Complex World In this first of a four-part series, Global Underwater Explorers’ (GUE) founder and president Jarrod Jablonski explores the historical development of GUE decompression protocols, with a focus on technical diving and the evolving trends in decompression research.
Tren Maya is on the Wrong Track! An Update.
Doping for Depth
Configure Me This: The Annotated Sidemounter
Hydrogen, At Last?
The Who’s Who of Sidemount
Hyperbaric Chambers Are Turning Away Divers. Will There Be One Nearby When You Need It?
The Aftermath Of Love: Don Shirley and Dave Shaw
Let There Be Mix!
