Listening to bearded seals in Holmiabukta: A Reflection on Place and Sound. (Week 10)

For this blog, I chose a field recording of bearded seals captured with a hydrophone submerged about 5m deep underwater in Holmiabukta, Svalberd. I was exploring Radio Apree, and this recording in particular caught my attention because of it’s haunting, otherworldly qualities. I listened a few times to try and gain some understanding of how place can be felt in sound.

The recording starts with ambient watery sounds that could be underwater currents, the water surface above, or the ice above creaking. It then is pierced by a series of whistling sounds descending in pitch and speed that continue throughout the recording, almost in a Risset rhythm kind of way, like an LFO with it’s rate mapped to key-tracking, it generally wobbles twice then descends one note on some kind of scale, gradually slowing as it gets deeper. it then repeats once more before the recording ends. The sound is almost musical, it has a definite sense of structure, rhythm and melody to it. It makes me intrigued at the idea of exploring microtonal tuning using this same scale in my own pieces.

It’s a very alien mysterious sound, unlike any animals above ground, it’s distinctly non-human. The variation in pitch and rhythm could be a form of communication or mating display? there’s no audible human sounds, which makes the recording feel very distinct amongst many of the other field recordings I listened to before deciding on one.

The recording evokes a cold isolated environment with the muffled watery sounds. The seal’s call is almost scary just in terms of how alien it sounds to the listener, it makes the place recorded sound inhospitable for humans, reinforcing the remoteness of the area.

From the description of the recording we can tell that the recording was made using a JrF hydrophone positioned 5 meters below the surface of a hole drilled through ice.

Listening to the recording allows one to to guess about the environment, but there would always be a sense of unknown present due to the nature of underwater sound. without the description I would guess it was recorded underwater and that some animal was communicating, but outside that I wouldn’t be able to discern much outside the qualities of the sound. It leaves much room for imagination, which is a strength of sound as a medium in my opinion.