Aquatic echoes

Jan 15, 2023, 12:06 PM

"Aquatic Echoes is my interpretation of an underwater recording from the PALAOA observatory on the Antarctic Ice Shelf. The recording is a very dense one, with sounds from an Antarctic Minke Whale, Weddell Seals and even distant Leopard seals. The recording also contains a lot of noise. I don’t know the source of this noise. Maybe it’s a ship, maybe it’s the ice, maybe it’s the self-noise of the equipment, maybe it’s an overhead storm. These animals are unfamiliar to me; I don’t even know the circumstances under which it was recorded. But it evokes a strange, alien world. A world consisting more of sound than anything else. 

"I was struck by the thumping of the Antarctic Whale. A repetitive low pulse almost continuously present in the two minute long recording. Other than he very clear and present calls from the Weddell seals, this thumping was buried in the noise floor, almost hidden. The unseen fundament of the soundscape. I wanted this sound to form the backbone of my composition. I admit that I actually don’t know if this low thumping is the Antarctic Minke Whale, it sounds lower than the few samples I found online. But the title of the track is Weddell seals chirping + thumping Antarctic minke whale.  

"For all I know, the thumping I isolated is a distant ship. I decided not to care: it was obviously a very present part of the soundscape recorded here, and there is still a lot we don’t know about the vocalisations of the Antarctic Minke Whale, so who knows. And if it was a distant ship, it goes to show how rare a truly pristine soundscape is. I decided I would build my composition on this uncertainty, this mystery. I split up the recording in a few pieces, isolating the thumping, isolating the seal calls, some other high frequency content, and isolating the noise I filtered away as well. Then I started building with these components, taking the structure from the sounds I heard. I decided to also use two recordings I made myself. Two recordings that include this mystery. The first was an underwater soundscape I recorded in the fjords of Norway. As with all underwater recordings, it is difficult to tell what you are hearing exactly. The other recording was a call I recorded in a dense and remote African rain forest. For quite a while I did not know what made the call was, so just called it ‘desperate bird’. Now I do know (it’s not a bird), but the feeling of mystery has never left me. These are also two recordings closely related to water, and both of them also come from ecologies at risk. 

"In the composition I wanted to create this otherworldly atmosphere, sounds of places we don’t know, worlds unknown to us, but of which can get an inkling through sound. I wanted to sounds to be open and claustrophobic at the same time, and used some processing to dive into the very intricate and complex seal calls.  I even used the noise I had filtered away in the composition as well, further highlighting the mystery. This composition is not a translation of the Antarctic Ocean, but an exploration and evocation of worlds foreign to us.  I think listening is a great way of trying to understand what these places could mean, and by expansion, what unfamiliar places can mean to us. This is why I was looking for these aquatic echoes."

Weddell seal reimagined by Stijn Demeulenaere.

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: Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia