Antarctic purrrumble

Jan 13, 2023, 12:42 PM

"This is an interspecies love song, it is of a polyamorous love, a response to a mating call heard via a field recording out of time and out of place, supposed for another sensory system, that of more-than-human beings. The crabeater seal vocalizes mainly during the breeding season between October and December. Although the males do not defend underwater territories, they are thought to guard a single female on the ice until she is ready for mating and conception. Unlike some other species, the Crabeater females will pull themselves out alone on the ice to give birth. An adult male (not the biological father) will attend to the mother and pup until about 2 weeks after the pup is weaned.

"Making with: After bringing the track into software and slowing it down it became really clear that this sound was a purr made up of beat ‘pips’ and there is a circularity to this purr, it circumambulates, a loop. It may be the disconnect that can come with listening to a field recording but we sat with this tension and both had this overwhelming vision of a space out of time, we were thinking of geometries, cubes and spheres colliding before we came to a sense of a horizontal plane that held the ground for these circular whirrs of purr, like loading icons sounding their way across ice. In working via collaboration there was an innate understanding of how to approach the recording, we were deep listening, being present with this call as much as our human faculties could manage. As we began to respond via sympoiesis with this sounding event, rhythm and melody that was at first forcing its way to our ears insisted on giving way to a kind of complexity of looped purrs and angular interjections. We found that we were wanting to exhale, breath - out - sharp, to pull this sound from the vacuum pit of the diaphragm because we have it too, this desire for polyamory. Once we were moving in this way we spoke to each other in exhales as the track was moving, we were intuiting our responses and simply conduiting these sounds in their release."

Crabeater seal reimagined by Briony Clarke & Aimee Lockwood.

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