Translatlantilexic
Jan 19, 2023, 11:45 AM
"Between 79°00'00.7"N and 5°40'07.3"E
an answering machine
is drowning in the Greenland Sea.
Down here, a toothed whale swims along
and leaves a message – or a song?
For who? What did it say?
Up there, nobody knows a way
how to make sense of that strange noise.
A speaking whale? A whale-ish voice?
Yet, up above the surface high
the human world brawls in reply.
A clicking, whistling, rattling way -
all misconceived and gone astray.
"When I first heard the material, my immediate association was the idea of receiving a voicemail from this odontocete that left its acoustic trace on the recording. Throughout the composing process, I encountered different situations, where humans tend to communicate through rhythmic, pulsing noises. I ended up collecting some of them and arranged them in a juxtaposed pattern. What developed was a kind of dialogue, within which communication always fails, despite the fact, that similar techniques are being used by both sides. Aside from the original recording of the whale, you will hear a multitude of human sounds, that share the characteristic of varying rhythm and tone, in order to be used as a tool for communication.
"In my view, that is one central question, in which the arts and sciences are closely related to one another – even if they tackle the issue with differing tools: both share the quest to describe our world and to communicating their respective findings through specific ways to a certain audience."
Odontocete clicks reimagined by Nathalie Anne-Marie Rosenbaum.
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: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Striped_dolphin_in_the_Ligurian_Sea.jpg
an answering machine
is drowning in the Greenland Sea.
Down here, a toothed whale swims along
and leaves a message – or a song?
For who? What did it say?
Up there, nobody knows a way
how to make sense of that strange noise.
A speaking whale? A whale-ish voice?
Yet, up above the surface high
the human world brawls in reply.
A clicking, whistling, rattling way -
all misconceived and gone astray.
"When I first heard the material, my immediate association was the idea of receiving a voicemail from this odontocete that left its acoustic trace on the recording. Throughout the composing process, I encountered different situations, where humans tend to communicate through rhythmic, pulsing noises. I ended up collecting some of them and arranged them in a juxtaposed pattern. What developed was a kind of dialogue, within which communication always fails, despite the fact, that similar techniques are being used by both sides. Aside from the original recording of the whale, you will hear a multitude of human sounds, that share the characteristic of varying rhythm and tone, in order to be used as a tool for communication.
"In my view, that is one central question, in which the arts and sciences are closely related to one another – even if they tackle the issue with differing tools: both share the quest to describe our world and to communicating their respective findings through specific ways to a certain audience."
Odontocete clicks reimagined by Nathalie Anne-Marie Rosenbaum.
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: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Striped_dolphin_in_the_Ligurian_Sea.jpg