Whalefall
Deep below rising sea levels, whales sing to one another across hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilometres. But whales' voices are changing and so is the way they speak to us. Their songs shift as they cross the oceans. Their pitch is moving downward, perhaps to be heard in an ever noisier seascape.
Whalefall, made in collaboration with Ben Byrne, listens to the stories of leviathans, mythic and real. These giants of the deep swim through our imagination, as sea monsters to be feared and tamed, the power of the state as conceived by Thomas Hobbes, and echoes of natural beauty. We hear the whales' calls echo, field recordings played back, their envelopes followed through modular synthesis. Pitch bends with depth and pressure and sub bass shudders as we dive deeper. We stumble into a haunted ballroom in the belly of a whale, before falling to the ocean floor.
The leviathan, it turns out, is human.
With the voices of:
Rebecca Giggs, author of Fathoms: The World in the Whale
Dr Alexandra Chadwick, Editor-in-Chief of the Hobbes Studies Journal
Dr Kennet Lundin, Senior curator of the Gothenburg Natural History Museum
Thanks to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology | Macaulay Library for the use of their archival recordings, recorded by Donald K. Ljungblad, Paul J. Perkins and Paul O. Thompson.