The practice of deeply listening to the landscape invites listeners to engage in embodied understanding of the ways in which we are all intertwined with the natural world, its beauty and its fragility. 

 Sounds of Khumbu – with Pasang Sherpa, Maicen Stuart, and Declan Taylor

As part of the Sherpa Song project, in May of 2023 we traveled to the sacred Khumbu valley in the mountains of NE Nepal to learn about the community’s research needs, and in the process recorded sounds of the landscapes, waterscapes and people. We created a soundscape of the intertwining of community livelihoods and sacred water, Sounds of Khumbu, that debuted at opening celebrations of the Community Digital Heritage Studio (CODHers) in October 2023.

Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change  – with Susie Ibarra

Water Rhythms is a story of climate change told through the phenomenology and embodied experience of listening to freshwater. It is the story about the dualism of water, the universal connector of nature and humans, that is both beautiful and fragile. It is an intergenerational story of the rapid change and depletion of our glaciers and freshwater sources worldwide. Glaciers and ice sheets are the world’s water towers, holding 99% of the freshwater on Earth. As glaciers worldwide shrink and disappear in response to climate change, these water rhythms are also shifting and fading from view.

We have been sonically mapping changes in glacier runoff from the source to the sink, from the glaciated mountains to the ocean, from some of the world’s most important water towers, including the Coast Mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the Indian Himalayas. Through field recordings taken from both above and below the ice and the water,  including the sounds and music of the people who live along the waterways, we are listening to the sounds of climate change. We are listening to the stories the water is telling us about a world of increasing ecological precarity.

Humans are inextricably connected to the earth’s freshwater; the same rhythms of glacial meltwater that flow from the mountains to the sea flow through our bodies, our cultures, histories and our music.  In listening to the rhythms of these waters, we hear tempos that match the sweet spot at which music from all over the world is created and played. They  also match our heartbeats at birth.  A world losing its flowing freshwater is hence a world losing its music, its culture and its humanity.

Listen to and read more about Water Rhythms in our recent Soundwork in BC Studies , our StoryMaps page and some of our collaborations with Sonic Matter openlab.

ITERATIONS OF WATER RHYTHMS

Water, for Reverberations. an online exhibition of art, science, and sound produced by the USDA Forest Service and The Nature of Cities, launched in fall 2023.

Water Rhythms at the Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA. We created an 7 channel sound installation in the Black Box Gallery at the Exploratorium, including compositions from five water towers and the San Francisco Bay. The exhibit ran from August 12 to October 23, 2022.

Water Rhythms at the Exploratorium, August 12, 2022 – October 23, 2022. 

We also held a public museum talk on the creative process and the development of the exhibit on Oct. 20, 2022. Here is a recording of the talk.

Water Rhythms exhibition, Fridman Gallery, NY. We created a 14 channel sound installation, with accompanying video montage, for the Fridman Gallery in Beacon, NY. The exhibit opened on October 30, 2021. An excerpt of the piece can be seen on Vimeo here:

Water Rhythms at Fridman Gallery

Water Rhythms Archive Room, a sonic installation at the Arko Arts Center in Seoul, S. Korea, September to December 2021. ARKO Water Rhythms Archive Lounge brochure and Arko composition MP3

Water Rhythms Listening Room, a sound installation and meditation space at the TED Countdown conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, October 12-15, 2021.

TED Countdown Summit. October 12-15, 2021, Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Water Rhythms: Listening to climate change, a podcast exploration of the stories of ice and water as they respond to climate change, was commissioned by Counterflows At Home, a festival of arts of music based in Glasgow, Scotland, and launched April 12, 2021: