Fin and glacier

Jan 10, 2023, 09:04 PM

"The sounds themselves are very low pitched, below the human range of hearing in many cases. In order to best make use of the recording, I took chunk and pitched them up from 1-3 octaves. From there, I processed the sounds with filters, reverbs, more pitch bending, delays, and time stretching tools to create interesting pads, swells, and percussion.

"The long atonal pads you hear throughout the piece are longer segments of the fin whales making sound, as well as noise from the recording equipment. The drums are created from short chunks of the whales vocalizing, time stretched to create a short transient.

"The rest of the piece is piano and percussion, with one synthesizer line, to create a sense of long frozen landscapes and crackling ice sheets, along with some movement of the waves beneath."

Fin whale reimagined by Jeff Brice.

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