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Geraint Rhys - First contact (seismic shooting)

from Polar Sounds by Cities and Memory

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about

The sound I chose to work with was the Airgun pulse that is used to explore the ocean bed for oil and gas. As soon as I heard the clip, it sounded to me eerily like bombs going off. Wondering what impact this had for the acoustic soundscapes of the Arctic (where the clips were recorded), I then did some reading around the topic and although research is still it’s in its early days, it is suggested that airguns do impact life in the ocean, in particular masking communication and impacting the travel routes of whales.

I then wondered, as the Arctic Sea ice melts and shipping and airgun exploration intensifies and these bomb like noises become more frequent, what impact will it have on the acoustic environment, and those living in it?

So, I decided to create a dystopian future narrative as if we were talking to the whales in the future and asking them how the airgun noise has impacted their lives.

I am from Swansea, a city which was severely impacted by bombing in the second world war, and so for the voices of the whales, I decided to search the archives of Swansea Library for interviews of people talking about the devastation the bombing had on them and the city.
Surprisingly, their descriptions on some of the ways the bombs impacted their lives matched with what research suggests is happening to the whales and so I used the clips from the archives to represent the whales’ story.

I then merged these interview clips with the sound of the airgun pulses, keeping it a constant throughout the piece and then created a brief narrative at the beginning, introducing us to a future world where we are now made aware of just how damaging the airguns have been.

The great thing about using dystopian storytelling like this is that it gives us the flexibility to explore potential possibilities of what could happen to the environment. As such, it is great for asking questions that we do not know the answers for yet.

When people hear the piece not only do I want them to think about the acoustic world of the seas, the sound of the airguns, and the politics of what this means for the future health of our oceans, but I also want to emphasise that there is also still time to prevent these impacts becoming irreversible.

credits

from Polar Sounds, released February 6, 2023

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Cities and Memory Oxford, UK

Cities and Memory is one of the world’s biggest sound projects, a global, collaborative sound art and field recording programme with the aim of remixing the world, one sound at a time. It covers more than 100 countries and territories with 5,000+ sounds and more than 1,000 contributing artists.
Thousands of field recordings, recomposed and reimagined by artists around the world. ... more

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