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"You can look across a vast expanse of ice, all white and blue and cold, and see nothing. The lead is choked with pack ice or sealed over with newly formed ice, and there is no movement or sound. With few birds, no whales and no bears, one might mistake the Arctic for a desert. But if you go down to the ice edge, pick a hole in the new ice deep enough to reach water and drop in a hydrophone (an underwater microphone), the cacophony is astonishing. "

"The inner sounds of objects and substances picked up with contact mics or hydrophones never cease to amaze. For Inner Out, Italian sound designer and artist Nicola Giannini uses contact mics frozen in ice, and performs a concert on them by playing the ice. Using different objects and techniques, such as grinding, tapping, hitting the ice, or pouring hot water, he creates the source material which he processes with live electronics to create a surround concert."

"Winds blowing across snow dunes on Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf cause the massive ice slab's surface to vibrate, producing a near-constant drumroll of seismic tones. Video: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego."

"I came across the work of Chris Watson when first introduced to his glacier recordings (1). I was immediately fascinated. These peculiar sounds had obsessed me since watching an episode of the 90s TV series "A Northern Exposure". Every spring, a whole Alaskan town almost goes insane because of having to hear the sounds of melting snows and glaciers for several weeks. Such a powerful and strange phenomenon. Few years later, a random event brought me to similar thoughts: the compacted ice after a day of heavy snow, melting on the terrace above the small flat in Newington Green I was living in at that time. We heard the squeaky, screechy and creaking sounds for days. Day after day we kept wondering whether those noises we had never heard before were actually coming from the ice."

In this second interpretive video for "Living with Concepts," Norway-based artist Jana Winderen discusses the four-channel audio installation "Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone: From the Barents Sea to Lake Ontario": https://vimeo.com/613751409 Composed from field recordings in the Barents Sea along the marginal ice zone (an ecologically vulnerable, dynamic border between the open sea and the sea ice), Winderen's composition documents wildlife activities that all depend on the annual spring bloom: plankton, bearded seals, humpbacks and orcas, crustaceans and spawning cod. On UTM campus, these sounds connect the vulnerable ecologies of the Barents Sea with the seasonal rhythms of local forest ecologies, and the distressed waterways of Lake Ontario and the Credit River. "Spring Bloom" plays during daylight hours only. It is periodically shut off in response to seasonal ecological activity, determined in consultation with faculty in UTMBiology. See the Blackwood website for current playback conditions: https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/program/living-with-concepts First presented in Mississauga by the Blackwood for "The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea," "Spring Bloom" is currently installed at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus, 2021-2024, as part of "Living with Concepts." Artwork storage and transport sponsored by Musket Transport Ltd. Video by Vuk Dragojevic.

"What do you hear when you think of the Arctic and Antarctic? "Singing" ice, a seal that sounds like it is in space, and a seismic airgun thundering like a bomb are some of the noises released by two marine acoustic labs. The project introduces the public to 50 rarely heard sounds recorded underwater in the polar regions. It highlights how noisy oceans are becoming due to increased human activity that also disrupts sea life."

"Scientists and musicians are recording the sounds of unfreezing water to document and predict the effects of climate change. Can their work help slow it, too?"

"A sound artist and musician, Cusack explores the relationship between the sound in an environment, its geography or physical features, and the people living and working there. Peter Cusack ImageHe travels the world to study and collect sounds that uniquely define cultures and ecosystems, from the crack of spring ice breakup on Siberia's Lake Baikal to the sounds of Chernobyl and other sites that have sustained major environmental damage. He is senior lecturer in Sound Arts & Design, London College of Communication, University of Arts London."

"Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself creates. The needle catches on the last loop, and the records play for nearly two hours, until completely melted."

"Chris Watson shares his experience as a composer and location wildlife sound recordist, discussing the technical elements of field sound recording and presenting his recordings of the rainforests near Iguazu Falls in Brazil and Brinicles (icicles forming under sea ice) in the Arctic and Antarctic. He concludes with a case study, presenting a piece of sound art, commissioned by the National Gallery, created in response to John Constable's The Cornfield."

"Jana Winderen is an artist, widely known for her recordings that reveal sounds from hidden sources - oceans, ice crevasses, glaciers - using a variety of technology, from high quality hydrophones to ultrasound detectors. Her work is published on Touch Music (same as Chris Watson) and her biography boasts of a long and impressive list of art installations."

"Climate change is existentially terrifying and also frustratingly abstract-a combination that makes it really hard for many people to connect with in a personal way, as one does with say, a work of art. Enter the Chicago-based duo Luftwerk-Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero-who have bridged that disconnect with their latest public art installation, White Wanderer, currently on view in Chicago's Riverside Plaza through October 1st. Bachmaier and Gallero are known for their luminous light-based installations in public spaces and architecture, and their latest effort is their first attempt to incorporate climate change messaging into their work. Outstream Video   00:00 00:00 "