Profunda señal
Jan 10, 2023, 08:55 PM
"The first time I heard the Antarctic blue whale recording, I was amazed by its really subtle signal on my headphones. I knew I was not able to hear it entirely, because it was coming from far beyond our human scale of sensibility. So, I heard it a second time on my speakers, to help me bring the basses, and then, everything around my room started to tremble. It made me think of the Alvin Lucier’s project on “Music for Solo Performer” in which he brings to our senses his own brain waves by using percussions as a medium. I appreciate this gesture of not translating the unhearable but rather approach us to this sort of abyss from which we have little knowledge of.
"To begin this submersion, I decided to operate with “Izotope Iris 2”, to analyze the spectrum of the sound and choose the frequencies I wanted to work with. It allowed me to silence the higher frequencies and focus on the most powerful ones between 0 and 100 Hz. There was a constant beating in the singing that reminded me of a way of playing an earth instrument I build last year. Inspired by the “Udu” percussion, this instrument had two entries of air. We were two players trying to reach the same frequency with our voice inside of the vase and whenever we succeeded, there was this beating in the air making our bodies and the earth vibrate.
"I wanted to use this sound as a form of response, inspired by the work of Aline Pénitot in “Feral Interactions—The Answer of the Humpback Whale” where she was able to communicate through the play of a bassoon, I lowered the frequencies of our playing recording so it could match the blue whale’s tone.
"I started then by curiosity to transpose the whale singing from octave to octave in my midi instrument until recognizing the scale at which normally it is presented, where it is the most audible. Each time “I leveled it up” the time of reproduction was getting shorter. It made me think of the shorter life of insects and how we’re undoubtedly inside of a fractal scale play where size, sound and time are related to our rhythm of existence.
"It appears to me that the earth has a complex system to regulate itself from the micro to the macro world and we’re just a piece of it, we can only sense a piece of it. Recognize our perception limits can help us redesign our sound interactions with other species. Helping us to avoid the unconscious invasion of what’s out of our range.
"The end of this composition called “Señal profunda” reminds me of the sound of a warning, a kind of alarm coming from this depth signal asking us, if we are going to wait to be able to hear the damage we’re doing to stop it."
Blue whale reimagined by Nicole Vereau.
Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Explore the project in full at http://citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds.
"To begin this submersion, I decided to operate with “Izotope Iris 2”, to analyze the spectrum of the sound and choose the frequencies I wanted to work with. It allowed me to silence the higher frequencies and focus on the most powerful ones between 0 and 100 Hz. There was a constant beating in the singing that reminded me of a way of playing an earth instrument I build last year. Inspired by the “Udu” percussion, this instrument had two entries of air. We were two players trying to reach the same frequency with our voice inside of the vase and whenever we succeeded, there was this beating in the air making our bodies and the earth vibrate.
"I wanted to use this sound as a form of response, inspired by the work of Aline Pénitot in “Feral Interactions—The Answer of the Humpback Whale” where she was able to communicate through the play of a bassoon, I lowered the frequencies of our playing recording so it could match the blue whale’s tone.
"I started then by curiosity to transpose the whale singing from octave to octave in my midi instrument until recognizing the scale at which normally it is presented, where it is the most audible. Each time “I leveled it up” the time of reproduction was getting shorter. It made me think of the shorter life of insects and how we’re undoubtedly inside of a fractal scale play where size, sound and time are related to our rhythm of existence.
"It appears to me that the earth has a complex system to regulate itself from the micro to the macro world and we’re just a piece of it, we can only sense a piece of it. Recognize our perception limits can help us redesign our sound interactions with other species. Helping us to avoid the unconscious invasion of what’s out of our range.
"The end of this composition called “Señal profunda” reminds me of the sound of a warning, a kind of alarm coming from this depth signal asking us, if we are going to wait to be able to hear the damage we’re doing to stop it."
Blue whale reimagined by Nicole Vereau.
Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Explore the project in full at http://citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds.