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“I am not archiving that sound or this sound - that’s not interesting to me,” Winderen said. Her albums - particularly “ Energy Field” from 2010, which occasionally calls to mind drum-less heavy metal or an untuned violin - unfurl as tone poems, giving her changing surroundings a spiritual gravitas. She processes raw recordings, turning them into extended collages. But she has never hoped to be a mere stenographer, simply playing back what she heard while suspended precariously in glacial crevasses or trying not to capsize off the coast of Greenland after icebergs hit the water. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside. “It wasn’t like I had just recorded something and brought it there.”Įvery time Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. “People could close their eyes and be there with the ice, be present,” she said. Even fusillades of tiny pops from escaping air proved evocative, as the frozen world gave way to heat.

#Frozen recorder songbook free#

A photo of an iceberg, she recognized, was gorgeous the brutal noise it made while breaking free from a glacier, however, could be harrowing. “How can people care about that when they’re dealing with immediate problems? Music can make those connections.”Ī former aspiring marine biologist whose mother was an early member of the Norwegian environmental advocacy group Future in Our Hands, Winderen soon realized the transformative capabilities of such sounds.

“When people like me start talking about melting ice, it seems so far-off and unconnected from our everyday lives,” continued Deane, who has contributed recordings to immersive installations by the Canadian artist Mia Feuer. Such science, he warned, held only so much possible public sway. He aims to build 12 substations along Greenland’s coast to chart the attrition of the island’s gargantuan ice sheet through sound.

But the glaciers Deane studies are receding at a rapid rate he attributes to greenhouse gases, and he believes it’s possible to hear that acceleration. The planet is in a constant state of flux, of course, so melting ice and calving glaciers are natural processes, with changing seasons or epochs. Since 2009, he has plotted methods to use recordings of melting ice and calving glaciers - chunks splitting from the monolith’s edge above or below water - to document and predict the rate of loss and concomitant rise of sea levels. “I’m privileged that I can go somewhere and study these glaciers, but what about people who have to use their imaginations?” asked Grant Deane, 61, a longtime researcher at the University of California‌‌, San Diego. “The sound conveyed what it was like to be there.” “It gave people a different way into what I was talking about, other than just showing slides,” Sharp, 64, said with a chuckle by phone. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asked for a copy, hoping to add sonic context to dry discussions about data and policy. Sharp began playing a 20-minute tape during lectures. Water trickled past the microphone, creating a vertiginous drone, while tiny bubbles - air trapped inside the ice, perhaps for centuries - exploded incessantly, creating an allegro of snaps and pops that conjured the electronic productions of Autechre and Aphex Twin. And below, as deep ice gradually thawed, an unexpected symphony unspooled. The result teemed with surprises: A snow bunting perched on the rig and sang. Almost as an afterthought, Sharp set up a little Sony hand-held recorder, hoping it might capture the essence of the frigid stillness where he often worked. Seven large microphones and GPS sensors monitored the rate of the melting ice atop the cap, while several seismic monitors sensed how the ice moved along the Earth, too. Several months earlier, Sharp - at that point, in 2009, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta for nearly two decades - had burrowed a cache of microphones into the Devon Ice Cap, a frozen mass in far northern Canada the size of Connecticut. As soon as Martin Sharp opened the file, he knew the ice had been singing all summer.