Tissue
Jan 15, 2023, 12:11 PM
"The field recording of rubbing sea ice was of mediocre quality and there were a lot of noises on the recording. I couldn’t quite distinguish the origins of sound. First there is something like a litte boat motor, then wind, then rustling and something metallic touching some other surface, then there it was: a squeaking, haunted sound, heavy and deep, possibly the large mass of ice tissue touching and rubbing against each other. It sounded almost like aching, like the interior of a living house, a body, a being, ancient tissue that is rubbing against each other and slowly sinking back into comfortable position.
"I decided to deliberately use everything that was there and echo all the noisy parts back into my composition and treat them as perfectly valuable sounds. So I imitated the noise through sound.
"What I heard made me think of the different timelines that meet within the various states of water. I perceive water as a being with different limbs stretching out in various densities and shapes: water, steam, fog, ice, cloud, rain, snow. All libraries of all the events of time, just presenting in a different time signature.
"The water underneath the ice might speak to the humid air above the ice sheet. The snow speaks with the melting drops of water that run back into the ocean body. Bubbles of air move towards the ice and collect underneath it. The ice itself acts as a wordless library of years and years, centuries, possibly millennia of information. It releases bits and pieces into its surroundings and the informations become alive again. A forever cycle.
"I treated the sound recording of the rubbing ice with different filters, pitch modulations and echoes. I took a certain part of the original sample and looped it, then added small time signature changes to the loops and also added more sound. In an attempt to recreate the formation of ice by layering sheets of water, the loops were created in one long session and then edited together with the samples and field recordings."
Rubbing sea ice reimagined by Katrin Hahner.
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.
"I decided to deliberately use everything that was there and echo all the noisy parts back into my composition and treat them as perfectly valuable sounds. So I imitated the noise through sound.
"What I heard made me think of the different timelines that meet within the various states of water. I perceive water as a being with different limbs stretching out in various densities and shapes: water, steam, fog, ice, cloud, rain, snow. All libraries of all the events of time, just presenting in a different time signature.
"The water underneath the ice might speak to the humid air above the ice sheet. The snow speaks with the melting drops of water that run back into the ocean body. Bubbles of air move towards the ice and collect underneath it. The ice itself acts as a wordless library of years and years, centuries, possibly millennia of information. It releases bits and pieces into its surroundings and the informations become alive again. A forever cycle.
"I treated the sound recording of the rubbing ice with different filters, pitch modulations and echoes. I took a certain part of the original sample and looped it, then added small time signature changes to the loops and also added more sound. In an attempt to recreate the formation of ice by layering sheets of water, the loops were created in one long session and then edited together with the samples and field recordings."
Rubbing sea ice reimagined by Katrin Hahner.
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.