Melting ice is music to some ears. Listen! – 03/23/2023 – Environment

As soon as Martin Sharp opened the file, he knew that the ice had been singing all summer.

It was 2009, and Sharp had been a glaciologist at the University of Alberta for nearly two decades. A few months earlier he had buried several microphones in the Devon ice cap, a frozen mass about the size of Connecticut in the far north of Canada. Seven large microphones and GPS sensors monitored the rate of melting of the ice cap’s top, and several seismic monitors tracked the displacement of the ice cap on Earth. For good measure, Sharp installed a small Sony tape recorder, hoping to capture the essence of the icy stillness of the place where he so often worked.

The result was surprising. A snowsweeper [um pássaro que vive em regiões árticas] landed on the equipment and sang. Seagulls flew over the scene. And down below, as the deep ice was gradually melting, an unexpected symphony began. Water trickled down the side of the microphone, creating a dizzying hum. Tiny bubbles formed by air trapped inside the ice, possibly for centuries, popped endlessly, creating an allegro of pops that evoked the electronic productions of Aphex Twin and the duo Autechre.

Sharp began playing a 20-minute recording of these sounds during his lectures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) requested a copy, keen to add sonic context to arid discussions of data and policy.

“The recording opened up another way for people to understand what I was talking about, not limited to just a slide show,” said Sharp, 64, speaking over the phone. “The sound conveyed to people what it was like to be there.”

In recent years, diverse and unexpected sounds produced by ice have periodically gone viral: the laser-like phenomenon of someone skating on thin ice, the shooting sensation of ice falling into a frozen hole, the meditative sighs of ice forming and cracking in a swedish lake. But many scientists and musicians believe that sounds can have an effect that goes beyond simply being objects of curiosity online.

Recordings of the sounds of melting ice, cracking glaciers and runoff from melting ice can help predict the speed of climate change and rising sea levels. Some people hope that music created with these sounds might make listeners rethink their relationship with nature. If more people can actually hear climate change with the previously unknown songs of disappearing ice, who knows, maybe they’ll be motivated to help prevent it?

“I’m privileged because I can go somewhere and study these glaciers. But what about people who can only rely on their imaginations?” said Grant Deane, 61, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

Since 2009, Deane has been creating methods to use recordings of melting ice and glaciers that break up — when large chunks crack and separate from the monolith edge, above or below the waterline — to document and predict the rate of ice loss. and concomitant rise in sea level.

Evidently, the planet lives in a state of constant flux, so the melting of ice and the fragmentation of glaciers are natural processes that occur with the change of seasons or times. But the glaciers that Deane studies are retreating at a rapid pace that he attributes to greenhouse gases, and he believes you can hear that acceleration. Deane plans to build 12 substations along Greenland’s coastline to sonically map the friction of the giant ice sheet that covers the island.

He made a caveat: the influence that this type of scientific research will have on the public is limited.

“When people like me start talking about melting ice, it seems far away and not very much related to our daily lives,” said Deane, who has contributed recordings to immersive installations by Canadian artist Mia Feuer. “How can people worry about that when they face problems here and now? Music is capable of creating those connections.”

For nearly two decades, Norwegian musician Jana Winderen has been pioneering work, transforming her recordings of glaciers and the land and water that surround them into emotionally charged albums—moving musical “postcards” sent from masses of melting and cracking ice.

In 2006, while vacationing with his family in Iceland, Winderen dropped a hydrophone under the edge of a glacier. It is a sealed microphone that detects underwater pressure changes. She asked her daughters, who were playing in the mud nearby, to be quiet so she could identify the source of the plaintive rumbling sounds.

“The sound seemed to be a noisy engine. I looked around to see if there was a tractor,” said Winderen, 57, speaking recently by video from his studio on his family’s farm on the outskirts of Oslo. “But I understood, for the first time, that the glacier was sliding — very, very slowly — in this water, under the sediments. And the sound has a presence, like a creature. I completely fell in love with it.

Winderen processes raw recordings and converts them into large collages. His albums unfold like tonal poems, lending a spiritual dignity to the changing environment around her. This is especially the case with “Energy Field”, from 2010, which at times is reminiscent of heavy metal without percussion or an untuned violin.

“I’m not recording this or that sound for posterity,” Winderen said. “That to me is not interesting. It’s much more interesting to be out there and listen, understand what’s going on and be aware of how much we ignore.”

For veteran Australian researcher and sound artist Philip Samartzis, it took an unusual Antarctic blizzard for him to accept the political potential of ice corners. Samartzis first visited Antarctica in 2010 on an arts grant to map the acoustic environment at the Davis Research Station, one of Australia’s three stations on the continent.

He wanted to know what existence was like at this end of the earth.

Speaking via video while on vacation in New Zealand, Samartzis, 60, explained: “I tried to reproduce what I experienced as authentically as possible. So you have very detailed forensic recordings of the station — without the wind, which I was very skilled at taking. .”

But, as he admitted with a smile, “purifying” the sound of the windiest place in the world by extracting the sound of the wind wasn’t very authentic. When he returned in February 2016, his intention was to focus on the wind itself, recording the ways in which it pulverized the place. He had an opportunity during the heaviest snowfall ever witnessed there during the austral summer. With ice and snow pummeling eight microphone stations throughout the 36-hour storm, his working timbre began to change.

Samartzis had often spoken in a tone of amazement about how the Antarctic ice “sings”, how dynamic and curious it always seemed to him. But the roars and rumbles he recorded were terrifying, a staggering testament to the fury of climate change. His work “Atmospheres and Disturbances”, released in March, meticulously presents the sounds of melting permafrost, retreating glaciers – and the human activity that seems to exacerbate both phenomena – at an observation station located in the Swiss Alps, more than 3 .2 km above sea level.

Hearing the disappearance is haunting and chilling, like watching a television show about ghost hunting.

“When I talk to scientists about climate change, everybody’s done talking. Essentially, everybody already knows, so people say ‘why should I listen to you and your report?'” says Samartzis. “These recordings may not be scientifically accurate, but they are a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different opening of experience.”

But at least one pioneer in portraying ice through music fears that all this work is coming too late. That simply taking these songs of surrender and playing them through loudspeakers will not convey the greatness of ice. More than three decades ago, the young German producer Thomas Köner sat at the foot of a glacier in Norway and was amazed to see the mist rise and then descend over it, like huge frozen lungs breathing carefully.

Between 1990 and 1993, Köner, who uses the pronouns elx or el@, channeled his observations into a trilogy of lauded albums that reproduce ambient sound, evoking the awe and discomfort of being surrounded by ice that rises, moves and cracks. But he thinks “Novaya Zemlya,” his 2012 album inspired in part by the glaciers of the Arctic archipelago of that name, could be his last work on ice. In 1961 the Soviet Union tested the largest atomic bomb in history on this archipelago. For Köner, this represents humanity’s true relationship with nature.

“It was the end, if not of the love affair, then of the beloved object: the idea of ​​this immaculate world made of ice,” said Köner, 57, speaking by telephone from an artist residency in Serbia. “It’s very sad, like you’ve lost a loved one. But you move on.”

That kind of ubiquitous melancholy is what drives Eliza Bozek, 30, and several other young musicians to try to get to the glaciers now, without delaying the project. An admirer of the emotionally textured work of Winderen and Chris Watson (a prolific sound artist partly responsible for David Attenborough’s “Frozen Planet”), Bozek thinks that if people can hear the ice, it creates an opportunity for awareness and possibly a behavior change.

Speaking from Copenhagen, Bozek, who signs his music under the pseudonym moltamole, commented: “The sounds are very beautiful, but they are also marked by drawn violence. They are political statements that are not available for us to listen to if they are not recorded. These are sounds create space for empathy.”

^{Translated by Clara Allain}