Welcome to a new album from the Sounds of Space Project, where we take you on a journey with the British Antarctic Survey’s 2023 Antarctic mission to experience the wonders of our Seventh Continent through sound, music, and image. We have previously journeyed to Antarctica to listen to the sounds of the Halley VLF receiver in Aurora Musicalis, experiencing the wonder of natural radio emanating from our planet. We have journeyed from the Earth to the solar system and beyond in Celestial Incantations, listened to the new sonification of our Sun in Sunconscious and responded to recordings from the Halley VLF receiver as a major solar event takes place in In Aurora’s Garden. We have written articles, given lectures, attended public events and brought science and art together.
One thing that we want to share is the depth of ongoing research at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who serve as the host of the Sounds of Space Project. For this album we sent audio recording equipment with the BAS Antarctic expedition with the simple proviso to capture the sounds of their journey without interfering with the research of the trip. Our host is the intrepid and wonderfully collaborative Kat Turner from the Polar Oceans Research Team at BAS, though we discover through the recordings the larger team of scientists that takes part in this Antarctic mission. Our thanks to each and all.
The similarities between Antarctic and space research and exploration are worth noting. A century ago, travelling to the Antarctic was almost as daunting as space travel is today. Both pose immense challenges, as humans can die easily in either place. Both are vast and immensely fragile. New technology is needed to work in either place, offering opportunities for scientific innovation that combine pure and applied research. Both are breathtakingly beautiful and can allow us to take the jump of compassion that enables greater care to be levelled on our planet.
The 2023 expedition follows on from the core work of expanding research and knowledge of our oceans, marine environment and coastal section of this continent that will be vital to understanding climate change on our planet. The ship set off on November 20, 2023, marking the Sir David Attenborough's first science expedition as part of the BIOPOLE project. During this period, the ship made several logistic trips to various British Antarctic bases, supplying much-needed provisions for the upcoming season. In addition, the ship conducted a series of experiments to study the impact of sea ice melting on biology, physics, and biogeochemistry, aiming to improve our understanding of the ever-changing climate.
During the trip, the world's largest iceberg, A23a, left the Weddell Sea and crossed the ship's path. This encounter provided an opportunity for some impromptu science and evoked awe at the colossal landscape. The sounds were recorded over the six-week period aboard, taking in both the sounds from the natural world and those of the instruments that allowed us to observe and understand these incredible environments.
The idea of making and releasing sound recordings such as these is not new. When Pierre Schaeffer released the Cinq études de bruits (Five Studies of Noises) in 1948, music would never be the same. Previous composition had been made by people, who would either improvise or score a piece of music to be reproduced again and again, with the craft of composition linked to the quest to better represent the ideas of a composer.
New advances in recording and projects to document endangered music by composers such as Bela Bartok and Vaughan Williams had established the idea that recording a piece of music could be extremely valuable to its preservation. Recording was transforming society and music at the same time we were exploring the Antarctic, our grandparents had access to player pianos, shellack and vinyl records as well as magnetic tape, all of which could reproduce a sound almost exactly every time. These innovations enabled musicians of the first half of the 20th Century to publish their performances as composers had previously published their scores.
All these years later we might miss the significance of the change, a little more than a hundred years ago it was impossible to hear the exact performance of a piece of music more than once, music and sound were completely ethereal and could only live in our memories. Recording enabled a performance to be the piece of music, not its score, completely changing music and allowing everything from jazz to pop to flourish in an entirely new way.
This was not enough for Schaeffer.
Schaeffer had the idea that there could be a type of music that did not have to played, where a sound recording could affect us in the same way a piece of music might affect us – the term musique concrète was given to describe the phenomenon. We now use the terms electro acoustic music, found sound and acoustic ecology to describe these sound compositions.
The idea behind musique concrète is simple and profound. Our world is constantly changing, and we can experience a sonic picture of the world just as we might take a photo. As we might understand history through archaeology, anthropology and musicology, we now understand history via sounds of our world. In short, we are seeing a rapid evolution of sound.
Our recent history is a history of sounds, seen in the archives of our broadcasting organisations and many of our national institutions. Sound is everywhere in our lives. Where would we be without a train or bus announcement, without the media players in our computers and phones. Sound is used in high level geological and medical research, as an integral part of conservation, and in the sonification of the space data we work with. With this understanding anything can be music, the hum of a light bulb, the sound of our breath, the sound of a ship breaking ice, the launching of a drone, the crunch of boots on pristine snow, nature, machinery and much more.
Treating sound with reverence enables this project. Kim Cunio returns to the way in which we worked on Aurora Musicalis, listening intently to the recordings made during the voyage and setting them to new piano music. This music is played with a single take to create the illusion that Kim is with the team as they conduct their business (Kim still hopes to play in Antarctica at some point in the future).
There is a deliberate change in the balance in this project. In Aurora Musicalis and our other albums, the balance is largely equal between ‘sound’ and piano. In this project we tried to imagine how the piano might sound where the research takes place. By calibrating the recorder’s setting back in the lab, it is possible to estimate a relative balance between the piano (the Yamaha C3 in Kim’s office), and the outside sounds. This estimation has led to a much louder Antarctic soundscape. At the same time we see images captured by Kat and the BAS team, lovingly re-interpreted by Diana Scarborough, who has made new visual works using the same slow dissolve methods she used in our series of short films for the Venice Biennale some years ago. Nigel Meredith takes a producer’s role to systematise what he has done at BAS, providing and documenting a methodology for art science collaboration. We get to know Kat Turner in this album and our notes are informed by her travelogue. Further reading is available if you wish to check out the science behind this trip. For now, we wish you a wonderful journey on board the Sir David Attenborough.
The Sounds of Space Project: Dr Nigel Meredith, a leading space weather research scientist at BAS, with over 140 articles in peer reviewed journals covering a wide range of topics in space plasma physics. Diana Scarborough, a Cambridge based multimedia artist, exhibited and commissioned in the UK and Europe. Professor Kim Cunio, Head of the New Zealand School of Music, and the Australian National University School of Music (2019-2023), is a researching composer combining activism, spirituality, and science. Joining the project is special guest Kat Turner, a PhD student at the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Southampton focusing on the intricate relationships between the ocean, atmosphere, and ice in the Amundsen Sea - one of Antarctica’s most fragile environments. Kat has a strong interest in science communication and in expanding the equity and reach of science.
Acknowledgements:
We would like to thank all of the scientists and engineers at BAS who have contributed to the success of the 2023 Antarctic mission. NM would like to acknowledge the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grants NE/R016038/1, and NE/X000389/1. KC wishes to acknowledge the ANU for the funding for his 2024 Outside Studies provision, which has enabled a residency at BAS in 2024. KT would like to acknowledge her PhD funding through the University of Southampton, and the National Environmental Research Council and the opportunity granted by the BIOPOLE project, a UKRI funded initiative.
FURTHER READING
1. ‘Sounds of space’ project page at the British Antarctic Survey
www.bas.ac.uk/project/sounds-of-space/
2. Meredith, N. P., K. Cunio, D. Scarborough and A. D. Wynne, Music of the Spheres, Astronomy and Geophysics, 63, 1, doi.org/10.1093/astrogeo/atac013, 2022.
3. Meredith, N. P., Turning the sounds of space into art, Astronomy and Geophysics, 60, 2, doi.org/10.1093/astrogeo/atz097, 2019.
FURTHER LISTENING
1. Listen to Nigel Meredith’s invited talk in the session “Dialogues between space science and art” at the 44th COSPAR Scientific Assembly, 21st July 2022. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHE_7fi6Pmk
2. Listen to Nigel Meredith speaking to the Cambridge University Astronomical Society about the ‘sounds of space’, 8th February 2022. www.youtube.com/watch?v=f33DdOOrqkc
