What lies beneath the ice is sacred
Jan 19, 2023, 11:45 AM
"My allocated sound for this project had the mysterious description of "Unidentified Artic Sound 3". Before setting down to work, I listened to the sound a number of times with my eyes closed, and I was immediately drawn to an eerie pitched resonance amongsts the relentless hiss, crackle and ice-white noise. I wondered what the source of this strange creaking resonance could be. Some of the descriptions for the other sounds offer possible clues - whale song, ship noises, rubbing sea ice - but it is impossible to say for certain.
"My first instinct was to reach for spectral analysis, to take a footprint of the noise floor and remove that from the signal to hone in on the salient spectral information (like in iZotope's RX software). While the result gave me no more insight into the identity of the original sounding body, it did give me a point from which to begin the composition.
"I would describe the approach taken with this piece as spectro-timbral, in that I begin with spectral analysis and extraction of the starting sound, and used this to define the overall structure, tonality and seed material for all the other sound organisation. I gathered some other field recordings that I captured a long time ago of a cold day and my feet crunching on ice, along with some bowed violin and bouzouki. Using custom software in Max/MSP, the isolated unidentified sound is analysed in real-time and used to combine and layer the other sounds and samples according to their timbral descriptors and tonal character. The result is a slow, steady movement of material, not unlike an icebreaker crashing through endless, frozen landscape with fractured, shattered musical elements interjecting."
Unidentified Arctic sound reimagined by Cárthach Ó Nuanáin.
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.
"My first instinct was to reach for spectral analysis, to take a footprint of the noise floor and remove that from the signal to hone in on the salient spectral information (like in iZotope's RX software). While the result gave me no more insight into the identity of the original sounding body, it did give me a point from which to begin the composition.
"I would describe the approach taken with this piece as spectro-timbral, in that I begin with spectral analysis and extraction of the starting sound, and used this to define the overall structure, tonality and seed material for all the other sound organisation. I gathered some other field recordings that I captured a long time ago of a cold day and my feet crunching on ice, along with some bowed violin and bouzouki. Using custom software in Max/MSP, the isolated unidentified sound is analysed in real-time and used to combine and layer the other sounds and samples according to their timbral descriptors and tonal character. The result is a slow, steady movement of material, not unlike an icebreaker crashing through endless, frozen landscape with fractured, shattered musical elements interjecting."
Unidentified Arctic sound reimagined by Cárthach Ó Nuanáin.
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.