A taste of the endless

Jan 16, 2023, 09:02 PM

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"About my composition: The first thing I noticed from the field recording was that there was a sense of movement. I imagined big  masses of ice moving, most of the time slowly but sometimes in a violent way. So, I thought that this was a good starting point. There are several ways to add movement to a piece of music. I used some of them. First of all, there is the panning. There is one sound that repeats from the start of the piece to the end of this that moves slowly from one extreme of the stereo field to the other (in Addition this sound appears on and off the beat constantly). There are also a couple of sounds (a flute and a melodica) that sometimes appear panned to the right and some other times panned to the left or, moving slowly from one side to the other. The second thing to give a movement sensation was to make the instrumentation more dense in some parts and more light in another parts. Also, though the pulse of the piece is always the same, there are parts that sound slower and some other parts that sound faster, because of the way it was orchestrated and the sounds and rhythms involved. Another way to add movement was to use several suspended chords (the harmony of the piece repeats over and over, and in a cycle of eight bars i included three suspended chords, a SUS2 and two SUS4, one of them moves to a dominant chord to finally resolve in the first grade). There is also a bass line that that is very simple but has some notes off the beat to also give the movement sensation.

"About the use of the provided field  recording, as it was long enough, I decided to use it to give frame to the music. The piece begins with the field recording and then the music begins and in the end the music gives space again to the field recording.  I thought that the nature was here before humans and, will remain after humans. This was the idea of organizing the piece in that way."

Rubbing sea ice reimagined by Carlos Devizia.

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