Fiding the Missing Piece in a Frozen Pond...

A couple of times a year, I travel abroad to record original sounds for myNoise. In 2015, I brought back the sounds of Sled Dogs and Arctic Wolves from Lapland, as well as many other sources that haven't been used on any soundscape so far. Audio recordings can remain unused for a while — years, sometimes — until they can be matched with the right soundscape. Mixing ten different sources is not easy when you want the final result to sound like one single recording. It is like a puzzle, where each sound has to fit perfectly with the others. Like a puzzle, it can take time to find a missing piece.

This winter I had the time to work on a recurring request: the sound of cracking ice. A frozen pond near my home had just the right amount of ice to produce interesting sounds when walked on. Sounds travel differently in water, and the attenuation over distance is much smaller than in air. Underwater microphones (hydrophones) were used to capture a variety of sounds produced over the whole frozen surface; sounds that wouldn't be audible from above the surface. Played back, these sounds revealed a polar soundscape, reminding me of the sound of distant glaciers collapsing. This provided not only a theme for a new sound generator, but also the missing pieces for the puzzle made from all the orphan recordings from Lapland. As you guessed, this puzzle is now complete — and is playing right now, for your listening pleasure.

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