Analysis of sound phase and amplitude fluctuations over a 1-m range has provided in situ statistics that can be used to infer the statistics of the ocean microstructure. A particularly fruitful use of such a simple acoustic miniprobe is the study of the sound phase fluctuations near the sea surface. With the aid of simultaneous statistics of temperature and wave height the observed sound phase fluctuations have been used to calculate bubble statistics at sea. At sound frequencies less than about 25 kHz the sound speed dispersion and its fluctuations reveal the bubble volume fraction and its standard deviation, respectively. At higher sound frequencies a large resonant bubble population can be identified by a cross correlation of sound phase and ocean wave height. In this case the predominant part of the sound phase modulation is caused by the changing bubble radius due to the fluctuating wave height. The spectrum of the sound phase modulation then mimics the ocean wind wave spectrum and its change with depth can be used to infer the change of number of resonant bubbles with depth.