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unknown wuuhing sound
for contrabass clarinet, electric guitar, violoncello, double bass, biophonic/geophonic ocean sounds and video. 2023
knm Kammerensemble Neue Musik
Cosima Gerhardt, cello; Jonathan Heilbron, double bass; Seth Josel, electric guitar, Theo Nabicht, contrabass clarinet
10.5.2023 Frequenz Festival
7.7.2023 Heroines of Sound Berlin



"unknown wuuhing sound" interweaves biophonic and geophonic sounds of the oceans with instrumental voices. The sounds of underwater animals - especially whales and seals - as well as other noises from the ocean soundscapes - such as ice rubbing, glacier calving - were obtained from scientific collections and archives ("unknown wuuhing sound" is also the label of a bioacoustic research recording). The patterns and rhythms of the voices of other living beings, their diversity, harshness and beauty, their alien expressiveness are taken up by the instruments and occasionally gently transformed electronically.

"unknown wuuhing sound" is based on  "Homeostasis", an audio-visual installation developed in 2022 with the video artist Robert Seidel in collaboration with scientists and bioacousticians from the German Oceanographic Museum for the 20-meter-high '1:1 Giants of the Seas' exhibition hall in the Ozeaneum Stralsund, as well as for the historic museum building of the Zoological Museum Kiel as part of the Frequenz Festival 2023.

In 1971, the article "Songs of Humpback Whales" by Roger Payne and Scott McVay appeared in "Science". The two marine scientists analyzed patterns of sounds emitted by whales, concluding that their structure merits them being called whale song. The notation in the score of "unknown wuhing sound" is based on the imaging of the spectrograms of these whale songs. The article showed images of spectrograms of these whale songs. - The notation in the score of "unknown wuhing sound" is based on the representation of the spectrograms in the article.

The popularization of whale songs - which were sent into space with the Voyager as acoustic documents of life on Earth - contributed to a change in ecological awareness: whaling was banned or extremely restricted worldwide, and the population of humpback whales, which were threatened with extinction at the time, was able to recover.

Robert Seidel's video projections use zoological and botanical information to visualize hybrid life forms using various technologies, including artificial intelligence/machine learning.