Whale Muse Seek (2014) is a short documentary that follows three Deaf boys—two of them from Samaná, the Dominican town where humpback whales arrive each year and are staged as a tourist spectacle. For the Deaf community, however, this encounter with whales has long remained inaccessible, reserved for others’ consumption.

Their parents joined them aboard a small yola together with artist Noa Batlle, clarinetist David Rothenberg, and a two-person camera crew. Equipped with SubPac, a wearable technology that translates sound into vibration, they set out to feel the live music of humpback whales — marking the first time such an interspecies concert with a Deaf audience and this technology had ever been attempted.

Directed by Batlle, with photography by María Victoria Hernández, the film traces this unprecedented encounter, where ocean and technology, whales and humans, Deaf and non-Deaf bodies resonate together. As Idelisa Bonnelly, the pioneering marine biologist of the Dominican Republic, observed, the project invites us to perceive the harmony that already exists between humanity and nature.

By amplifying whale-song and orchestral performance into a shared sensorium, Whale Muse Seek reimagines accessibility beyond the human. It proposes another way of listening — through vibration, through bodies, through the sea as a resonant chamber — to glimpse the possibility of interspecies community.