Merging with Water

Merging with Water

by | May 9, 2025 | Blog

On 30 April 2025, Arctic Auditories organized the online workshop “Merging with Waters” together with the Environmental Humanities Research Group (UiT). The aim of this workshop was to provide information about the current research processes and invite participants to reflect critically on them. There were presentations and discussions on three working packages as well as a joint listening to our sound stream.

Although the working packages consist of individual parts, there are various connections and overlaps between them. The diverse backgrounds of the researchers in the Arctic Auditories project team enabled each member to view their own working package from new, inspiring perspectives and learn from each other.

Making these mergings visible, and audible, were the focus of this afternoon.

Mapping Arctic Waters

In the first part, Britta Sweers talked about the soundwalks conducted in collaboration with diverse groups in and around Tromsø/Romsa which serve as a basis for many further processes of the project, in particular a multi-layered detailed soundmap. The evaluation of the huge amount of qualitative data collected, ranging from interview to photographs to recordings, is still in progress.

This working package is full of interdisciplinary aspects which, as became clear in the subsequent discussion, were found to be challenging but above all highly enriching. Which methodologies and methods do we consider to be scientifically valid? Generosity, curiosity and openness to learning from the perspective of others enable us to expand our own expert knowledge.

At the same time, this working package has shown how complex listening is, but also how much we know through bodily sensory experiences. To learn from this knowledge, we need dialogue and interpretation.  

Sound Archives

The second presentation focused mainly on sound maps. How can you organise sound recordings and merge them into a system that others can access? Angus Carlyle presented different formats of sound maps, and presented the various layers that informs the Arctic Auditories soundmap. In the workshop, we listened to some sound recordings made at the locations where the soundwalks had taken place.

An important aspect that was discussed is the connection between sound and text. Text itself can be a possible form of listening and sounding. Regarding the sound map – when is a textual description of a sound recording a useful guide, and when is it a limiting restriction? The question of how much textual description one wants to offer also arose during the planning and the realization of the soundwalks. The conductors were free to decide how much information they wanted to provide in advance, such as about the location or specific sounds.  

Another point that was discussed is the visual representation of sound maps. A sound map is always just one possible way of representation and never displays actual reality. What do we want to convey to the listener? And what decision do we therefore make about what and how we filter, or what and how we represent it on the map?

You can dive into these questions and some places in and around Tromsø/Romsa yourself while listening to the Arctic Auditories sound recordings: https://aporee.org/maps/work/projects.php?project=arcticauditories

Flowing, flushing, freezing, streaming: Audio zine workshop

Part of working package two is also the three-day “Experimental Audio Zine Workshop”, which will take place from 23 to 25 May 2025 at Tromsø Kunstforening in collaboration with the artists Andreas Kühne and Polina Medvedeva. The workshop is open to researchers, writers, artists, musicians, creators, students and anyone interested in storytelling, sound poetry and experimental publishing. Further information about the workshop and the sign up form can be found via this link: https://uit.no/tavla/artikkel/878919/arctic_auditories_experimental_audio_zine_works

Listening to the Soundstream

In the middle of the workshop, we immersed ourselves for a few minutes in the soundscape of Tromsø through our sound stream, which streams live from the roof of a building at the University of Tromsø. Pleasant sounds, such as birds heralding the arrival of spring, but also annoying sounds, such as an indefinable deep drone, moved us as listeners.

The stream transmits what the microphone picks up directly without any further sound manipulation. But as with the sound recordings, the stream does not reproduce reality, but rather translates the sound environment through technical processes. Every listening situation, whether listening in the physical space around us or listening to sounds from loudspeakers, is a unique bodily experience in its own way.

Online Writing League

In the last part of the workshop, Elizabeth Barron and Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen talked about the Online Writing League, which is part of working package three. In the Online Writing League, participants in two groups, one English-speaking and one Scandinavian-speaking, met digitally once a month over half a year. Based on the concept of emplacement (Barron et al., 2020) and inspired by prompts, key questions and keywords, the participants created artistic works in a wide variety of formats, from poetry to video to audio, and in various languages.

As demonstrated by the OWLs symposium the day before and the few works presented in the workshop, the intensive engagement with place, water and sound from different perspectives gave rise to an infinite variety of works that inspire further rich reflection and exchange. Based on these artistic explorations and further research on text and language, a glossary will be compiled, collecting ideas and thoughts on terms that have proven essential in all working packages throughout the project.

Connections, the focus of our workshop, emerged at various levels throughout the afternoon. Together, we were able to trace connections within the project between the individual working packages and recognize that each task is related to and influences the others. By listening together and to each other, we were able to establish connections between us that enabled a rich exchange. By listening to sound recordings and the sound stream, we were able to create connections to places, to our imaginations and to our bodies. By listening to our thoughts and perceptions, we were able to connect different water identities conceptually and think about how they are related and what role we play in this.

And what role can this project play? How can looking at climate and other environmental crises through a feminist lens and using the methods of our project lead to new, actionable changes?

Thank you to all participants for this inspiring afternoon!

Some links to resources shared by participants during the workshop:

All images and artistic works are displayed with the permission of the artists. Copyright: all individual artists

Sound Stream: A Journey

Sound Stream: A Journey

by | May 27, 2024 | Blog

I first encountered live online sound streams around the same time I started to explore the many forms of online soundmaps (that are discussed in the previous blog).

In 2006, I hung a microphone out of the window of what was then the offices of Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) on the 13th floor of a 1960s tower block in the area of London called Elephant & Castle. I remember dialling into that online stream from my home in Brighton at the same time as Jérôme Joy, a researcher at Locus Sonus who was living in Aix-en-Provence and who had helped me get the stream up and running (technical matters, especially those involving cables and mixers, never being my forte). As we both heard the window frame rattle, rain spatter the glass, rolling rumbles of thunder and a sky torn by lightning, we exchanged emails about our experiences of this strange triangulation of a listening between the microphone in London, headphones in Aix and loudspeakers in Brighton. In 2020, two months into the UK’s COVID-19 lockdown, as part of the launch of Night Blooms, a poetry and photography collection published by Makina Books, I ran through the woods that were the book’s inspiration live streaming my breath, the swish of my feet through grass, bird calls, traffic on Ditchling Road. In 2022, as part of our sonic explorations of the Port of Shoreham near our homes, Simon James and I live streamed the sound of the dawn tide rising over a bank of shingle. 

The 2006 stream was broadcast on the Locus Sonus map; in 2020 and 2023, the streams were part of the annual Reveil event created by Soundcamp to celebrate the dawn chorus, with streams from all over the world being mixed live over a period of 24 hours. Although there are other sound streaming platforms, protocols and practices, Locus Sonus and Soundcamp were my introduction to the process. Each organisation additionally amplified a space of exploration where such strange almost-simultaneous encounters with audio transmission as Joy and I experienced could be thought about and thought with. Locus Sonus hosted a number of symposia dedicated to the form; Soundcamp published the book Sounds Remote about the stream experience and commissioned a number of essays of which Ella Finer’s is exemplary.

For this year’s Reveil, Arctic Auditories established a live microphone on the roof of the Polarmuseet. In March at the Soundcamp HQ, Katrin and I had an induction to the technology: learning a little more about how the streambox –  the system through which the microphone connects to a mini-computer that connects to a nearby data network and routes the audio signal to a transmission server where Joy or I or anyone else can listen in.

Given what I said earlier about technical matters, it was lucky for me that Katrin was the person responsible for getting the streambox running, as I gather this was far from a simple operation, albeit an ultimately successful one. These screenshots show the audio stream running during Reveil.

The streambox itself underwent something of an eccentric voyage from Soundcamp HQ in Loughborough Junction to the Polarmuseet in Tromsø / Romsa. The protectively-packed equipment flew with Katrin’s luggage to Oslo before being handed to our colleague Silje Gaupseth’s partner (who took the box to a meeting at the Norwegian Parliament). After the flight to Tromsø / Romsa, the wonderful Benn Gjøran Johansen wrapped the water-proofed microphones and computer in a fishing net and secured the device to the roof of the Polarmuseet, where it is now installed.

The travels of the electronic audio equipment that were distinguished by bubble-wrap, physical hand-overs and being enclosed in secure netting and Katrin’s technical ministrations to ensure that the system functioned well both speak to something Grant from Soundcamp told us about regular streamers: that they establish relations of care with their streams. At our meetings, Katrin, Paula, Britta and I have talked about another aspect of that care relation – a certain vigilance of ‘checking in’ that involves making monitoring the stream something we turn to again and again, as entertainment, as education, as a reassurance things are OK. We dial in to hear what is happening on that harbour roof top: rain falling on the sloping tiles, a party of school children walking past, the slush of melting snow, a noon high tide making waves lap audibly the shore, kittiwake cries, the weekday percussion of construction work (a chorus of hammers, drills, ratchets and truck reversing sirens all conducted by indistinct shouts), the occasional helicopter, boat engines and the very rare sound of a boat horn and the perennial drone of traffic crossing the bridge.

I often share our Arctic Auditories audio feed with friends. Many are shocked at the disparity between what they imagined a harbour so far into the Arctic Circle might sound like and how very “urban” the microphone and box and its rooftop perch make Tromsø / Romsa sound. This experiential contrast is one potential significance of the stream for our project, an affective tension that I think has often been explored by projects sponsored through Soundcamp, Reveil and Locus Sonus.

The prosthetic aurality of our streambox offers remote listeners the opportunity to speculate how the specific microphone, gain settings and placement might amplify or attenuate particular features of the sounded environment in the historic harbour of Tromsø / Romsa; to wonder about what is made here and what now, what is near and what far; to question what it means to hear world as a “live” unfolding and perhaps to question what kinds of latencies (technical as much as cultural) insert themselves between the original releases of mechanical energy that a museum passer-by might hear and the transmission that vibrates from speakers connected to a distant computer.

You can listen to the feed here and let us know what you think.

References

Ella Finer, “Soundcamp 2020”

Kate Donovan, “Night Radio. Radio – anthropocene entanglements,”

Angus Carlyle, “Like Trees in a Wrong Forest”

Anneka French, “Everything Looks Different in the Dark”

Video showing the pages of Night Blooms

-Angus Carlyle