Melt – Museleon 2024
World Listening Day – 2024 – Listening to the Weave of Time
This year’s theme was created by Chilean sound artists Valentina Villarroel Ambiado and Camila Cijka Arzola, who work as the art collective AOIR.
This year, I decided to concentrate on the sounds of water – vital for ecosystems , communities, farming, fishing, industry – for life.
I live in an area where it is prevalent, either as rain, coast, streams and rivers but, even here, there has been a shift towards windier wetter winters, drowned fields and torrents of rainfall. The seasons are being erased, morphing into just weather.
Firstly, I decided to create a reimagined soundpiece about the melting glaciers due to the earth warming.
Like an ice cube on a hot summer day, many of Earth’s glaciers are shrinking.
With rapid climate change the glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising. The weave of time is unravelling.
Why Glaciers?
Glaciers can range in age from a couple hundred to thousands of years old. Most glaciers today are remnants of the massive ice sheets that covered Earth during the Ice Age, which ended more than 10,000 years ago. Around 10% of the world’s land surface is currently covered by glaciers, which store around 70% of the Earth’s freshwater.
With the increasingly fast paced melting of the glaciers, sea levels are rising, coastline communities are in retreat, coastal towns and villages are abandoned, islands are disappearing under the sea, freshwater for local communities is drying up or is harder to collect.
I took an original 45 minute field recording of traffic and surrounding street ambience recorded by freekit on Freesound and reduced it down by selecting tiny samples of the whole recording.
By processing, manipulation and editing the samples, I created a sonic sketch of cracking melting glaciers that culminates in a loud wave of static representing a large wave of water we are unable to stop. The final static wave also mimics breathing rhythmically, like the earth breathing, which stops abruptly.
Best listened through headphones but beware loud sounds.
I then created a One Minute Wonder
On Instagram I have been making short daily, one minute videos of watery things that I have seen and stopped to listen to. These I have titled ‘ There’s Nothing Like the Original’. The idea behind these snapshots in time is that electronics cannot do justice to the actual sounds and even capturing them on video in real-time, isn’t the same as being there.
To stop and really listen, to take in the world and be sensitive to all around you.
Finally, the artwork is a watercolour of mine but I digitally created the final piece using photography of the beach and seaweed – the connection between the glaciers hundreds of miles away and our local coastline – the symbiosis
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