Spectrum garden
Jan 13, 2023, 11:21 AM
"When first listening I was overwhelmed by the density and how alien the sounds were. I felt a need to understand them, and to do so I dissected them. They turned out to be well separable in the frequency spectrum, and I then slowed the separate sounds down by orders of magnitude, like using a microscope.
"To understand them even better, I decided to create a composition in which I put them together or contrast them with sounds that are similar but also a bit alien in nature and origin:
1. Organic sounds from a broken escalator.
2. Sounds from me playing an ultrasonic feedback loop instrument I built (with kind support from John Driscoll), whose spectrogram look very similar to the killer whale spectrogram.
"The resulting composition sounds like a nice garden, maybe underwater or in some other strange space, where different species co-exist with some interactions. I think this dissection and contrasting between organic, mechanic, and synthetic in origin and quality is my response to the question of the project: How can we understand these sounds?"
Killer whale and Ross seals reimagined by Håkan Jonsson.
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.
IMAGE: Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
"To understand them even better, I decided to create a composition in which I put them together or contrast them with sounds that are similar but also a bit alien in nature and origin:
1. Organic sounds from a broken escalator.
2. Sounds from me playing an ultrasonic feedback loop instrument I built (with kind support from John Driscoll), whose spectrogram look very similar to the killer whale spectrogram.
"The resulting composition sounds like a nice garden, maybe underwater or in some other strange space, where different species co-exist with some interactions. I think this dissection and contrasting between organic, mechanic, and synthetic in origin and quality is my response to the question of the project: How can we understand these sounds?"
Killer whale and Ross seals reimagined by Håkan Jonsson.
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.
IMAGE: Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons