Music from the Ice

Antarctic Underwater Freeze Ray

2012-01-27T09:03:00.000-08:00

Check out this amazing video from the BBC about underwater brinicles that freeze everything they touch!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/15835017

LASER Artist Talk, Monday Jan 9, 2012

2012-01-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

I'll be speaking about my polar music projects, both Antarctic and Arctic, this coming Monday at the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendevous (LASER) in San Francicso. Come by for a fun and interesting evening of presentations and conversations, plus snacks!

Monday January 9, 2012
6:30 - 9 pm

Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER)
The University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
Berman Hall
San Francisco, CA 94117

Admission is free but limited. Please RSVP to p@scaruffi.com

More details and schedule: http://www.leonardo.info/isast/events.html#LASER-Jan12

Instrument Demo Today

2011-12-03T12:57:00.001-08:00

This evening I'll be demonstrating my Antarctic Instruments at KALW's live storytelling event. One of the stories in the live Crosscurrents show will be about my Antarctic music. Plus I'll have CDs and photos for sale.

Saturday December 3, 6-9 pm, FREE!
Polish Club

3040 22nd Street, San Francisco, CA 94110

Join KALW for its final 70th anniversary event, in conjunction with the Mission Arts and Performance Project! This special evening will feature oral storytellers, radio producers, and musicians performing on the theme of "Beginnings and Endings." We'll also be bringing you an episode of KALW's "Crosscurrents" LIVE, with audience participation!

Performers include:

Glynn Washington (radio producer and host, NPR's "Snap Judgment")
Nikki Silva (radio producer, The Kitchen Sisters)
John Reichmuth (improv artist, Kasper Hauser Comedy Troupe)
Jon Mooallem (writer, New York Times Magazine)
Casey Miner (radio producer, KALW)
Julie Caine (radio producer, KALW)
Martina Castro (radio producer, KALW)
Ben Trefny (radio producer, KALW)
Ali Budner (radio producer and artist, KALW)

With music by Quinn Deveaux and Meklit Hadero.

North to the Arctic!

2011-08-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

In just a few weeks Oona Stern and I will be heading north to create a series of site-specific art installations in the Arctic. We'll journey to Spitsbergen and participate in the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency Program, exploring the region aboard a traditionally-rigged tall ship, alongside 20-or-so other artists, scientists and educators.

During the expedition Oona and I will develop Adfreeze Project, a series of artworks that combine sound and form to respond to our location each day. At each site a material or feature will be selected as a focus for visual and aural interactions. Natural patterns, evidence of changes in ecological systems, and other environmental events are of special interest to us.

On land, local materials such as stones, sand, driftwood, shells, ice, water, bones and vegetation will be manipulated to draw attention to an aspect of the site. These materials will also be played as musical instruments in compositions and improvisations that translate the site's physical forms into musical gestures. On the ship elements such as sea spray, waves, wind and snow, as well as sounds from the ship herself, will be shaped and recorded. Drawings, rubbings and other mark-making processes will create visual records, echoing the visual data collection of early explorers. Site characteristics and interventions will also be documented with video and photography. At each location, activities will leave no lasting impact on the site.

Post-residency, we will produce a series of multi-media portraits of the Arctic, designed for exhibition in galleries, educational institutions and online venues. I will also develop musical performances that can be played within, or in conjunction with, our art exhibitions. In these concerts I will perform solo on amplified natural objects from Spitsbergen in combination with edited field recordings made during our expedition. The first Adfreeze Project exhibition and performance will take place in Tromsø, Norway, in late October on our way back from Spitsbergen.

We'll be posting updates online as we travel through this land of polar bears and glaciers. Follow our Arctic adventures on the Adfreeze Project blog.

You can help support the project by purchasing special limited edition or subscription artworks, or by making a tax-deductible donation in any amount through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts.

KALW Radio Interview

2011-08-24T15:29:00.000-07:00

I recently spoke in depth with KALW's Martina Castro about my Antarctic music. Check out her radio feature about my work, which aired earlier this week on Crosscurrents from KALW News: The Audiophiles: Finding Music in the Sounds of Antarctica.

Australia Bound - Kickstarter

2011-05-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

In a little over a month Ann and I will be heading to Canberra, Australia to perform four of my compositions in a festival of Antarctic music at the Australian National University. I need your support to make this concert the very best it can be and have set up a Kickstarter project to raise the needed funds.

Ann and I are offering some very cool (pardon the pun!) rewards for contributors. These include field recordings, archival prints of photos from Antarctica, and your own musical instrument or composition. I am also producing a SPECIAL LIMITED-EDITION CD for donors only. This CD contains recordings of my first three Antarctic compositions (these will not be available elsewhere until the project is released it's entirety in 2012), and previously unreleased Antarctic field recordings. Plus each CD comes with a one-of-kind handmade cover.

Please consider donating and/or spreading the word. Thank you! Your support really makes a difference and is greatly appreciated.

Cheers!
Cheryl

Brash Ice Video

2011-05-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

Here is a short portrait of brash ice that Oona Stern and I created with audio, video and photos from our adventures at Palmer Station.

brash ice from oona stern + cheryl leonard on Vimeo.

Please use good quality speakers or headphones when listening so you can hear all the low bass sounds.

Elephant Seal Research

2011-04-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

Elephant Seals (Southern and Northern) in the news!

Researchers from UC Santa Cruz's Institute of Marine Sciences are studying the vocalizations of Northern Elephant Seals:
http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county/ci_17612280?nclick_check=1

Satellite tags attached to Southern Elephant Seals are providing data that measures changes in the Southern Ocean and its ecosystems, and helps map the Antarctic seafloor:
http://news.ucsc.edu/2010/10/seal-maps.html

Instruments Photo

2011-04-21T09:48:00.001-07:00

Most of the musical instruments I have constructed with Antarctic objects so far (I still plan to build more)...

Adélie penguin bones and Antarctic limpet (Nacella concinna) shells mounted in driftwood. Pictured (left to right, back to front): Vertebrae Mobile, 7" x 4" x 5", 2009; Limpet Shell Spine, 20" x 5" x 8", 2009; Coracoids, 13" x 5" x 5", 2010; Ghost, 8" x 5" x 7", 2010; Bone Slug, 10" x 4" x 6", 2009; Octobone, 12" x 7" x 6", 2010; Keel, 9" x 4" x 10", 2009.

DIY Instrument Tailgate Party this Sunday

2011-04-08T08:44:00.001-07:00

I'll be demonstrating my Antarctic instruments at this free event at Stanford University on Sunday. Come on by and make some sounds with my penguin bones, limpet shells and stones from the Antarctic Peninsula...

Sunday, April 10, 2011 | Noon to 4pm
White Plaza, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Free, Open to the Public, Family-Friendly (with activities for kids!)

Stanford University and Thingamajigs present a meet-up-style afternoon of demonstrations, sharing, and performances by and for the Bay Area instrument-building community. Two dozen instrument builders and musical inventors from the Bay Area and beyond will participate and demonstrate their projects. Visiting artist... and MacArthur Fellow Trimpin will serve as honored guest and Grand Marshal of the day's festivities, mingling with presenters and demonstrating some instruments of his own design.

Participants include:
Craig Parada / Matthew Goodheart / Tom Duff / chas smith / Fernando Lopez-Lezcano / Jiffer Harriman / Will Grant /Babak Falsafi / Sean Simon / Cheryl E. Leonard / Andrew Werby / Tim Thompson / Danishta Rivero / Wendy Reid / Stewart Port / Peter Nyboer / Larnie Fox / steve cooley / Ed Christensen / Alan Adler / courtney sexton / Bryan Day / Alan Tower & Kim Riccelli

Special guest artists will also
perform throughout the afternoon:
- Tom Nunn and Bart Hopkin Duo
- Mobius Operandi
- The Wreck of the Old #10

The event is co-hosted by Thingamajigs, the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and Stanford Lively Arts, with support from Stanford Continuing Studies.

Maps and Directions:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/visitorinfo/plan/maps.html

Antarctic Music Festival and Conference

2011-03-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

The Australia National University will be hosting an Antarctic Music Festival and Conference in Canberra this June. I am thrilled to announce that I will be performing several of my Antarctic compositions at ANU and will also give a talk about my work.

Antarctic Music Festival
June 24-26, 2011

Antarctica: Music, Sound and Cultural Connections
June 27-29, 2011
A creative arts conference that highlights the importance of sound (or lack of it) and music as part of the unique Antarctic environment

Both events are being hosted by ANU's Department of Music and celebrate the centenary of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Douglass Mawson. I am scheduled to perform Saturday June 25th at 8 pm, and to speak on Monday June 27th in Session 2, 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm.

Interview and Podcast

2011-03-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

Works and Conversations has posted an in-depth interview with me (discussing music, aikido, Antarctica, climbing and more) at
http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=262

Also Bay Area Sound Ecology has posted a podcast of the Antarctic sounds talk I gave at BASEbot 005 last year.
http://www.basoundecology.org/listen/2011/01/basebot-005-%E2%80%93-cheryl-leonards-antarctic-sound-and-music-sound-recording/

A Little Ice Piece

2011-03-09T08:59:00.001-08:00

So far I have eight Antarctic compositions that I am working to complete and record this spring and summer. These works range in length from 6 to 10 minutes each, so I already have close to an hour of Antarctic music. Additionally, I have ideas for two more pieces I'd like to write: one that combines my recordings of sparring Southern Elephant Seals with kelp horns, and a more gritty noise-oriented piece crafted from glacier ice recordings.

The Melting Marr Ice Piedmont, from Amsler Island

While searching out fodder for the ice noise composition I decided to put together a short glacier piece as a fun side project. So, here is Terminus, a little piece created entirely from field recordings of the Marr Ice Piedmont, including calving, small cubes of ice rolling down steep ice cliffs, the surface of the glacier creaking under my weight, and gurgling and percussive rhythms from small meltwater streams.

Terminus (1:00, CD-quality wav file, 9.7 MB)
Terminus (1:00, mp3 file, 2.2 MB)

I recommend listening to this piece on headphones or speakers with good bass response so you can hear the booming of the calving glacier properly. Enjoy!

Photos of Oona's Antarctic Artworks

2011-03-02T23:03:00.001-08:00

Check out the photos of Oona Stern's Antarctic drawings and sculptures from her recent exhibition, the reluctant naturalist.

http://antarcticice.blogspot.com/2011/02/reluctant-naturalist-37-drawings-2009.html

Oona Stern Solo Exhibition

2011-01-25T21:23:00.001-08:00

Oona Stern, my compatriot and Artboat Co-Captain at Palmer Station, has a solo exhibition of her Antarctic work up right now at Westchester Community College in New York. If you are in the area, I highly recommend that you go see it!

Also, I'll be speaking about my Antarctic music and doing a short performance at the opening reception next Wednesday...

Oona Stern
the reluctant naturalist

In January 2009 Oona Stern traveled to Palmer Station in Antarctica as a fellow with the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The study of ice and its structures was the focus of Stern's Antarctic research, and the reluctant naturalist is the first solo exhibition of work based on her residency.

A gallery talk with Oona Stern will be held on Wednesday, February 2, from 11am – 1pm.
Special guest Cheryl E. Leonard, sound artist and composer, will perform music also developed in Antarctica.

WESTCHESTER COMMUNITY COLLEGE FINE ARTS GALLERY • ACADEMIC ARTS BUILDING 3RD FLOOR
75 GRASSLANDS ROAD VALHALLA NEW YORK 10595 • 914.606.6621 • www.sunywcc.edu/gallery

In 2009 I was in Antarctica with the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. My focus was the study of ice and its structure. I returned with dozens of field drawings and over 4000 photographs. Previously my work had been inspired by architecture, construction and (sub)urban environments, resulting in public installations with a range of materials from decking to advertising posters. Nature appeared with a small “n” - a context for architectural practice, nothing more. Now, with Antarctica as source material, my work has shifted content, and Nature plays a leading role. I find myself examining natural patterns and structures as I did previously in an urban context. In my drawings the plaid-like patterning of glaciers and other ice forms has become an obsessive exploration, and in developing a visual vocabulary of nature’s frozen grids and plaids, I am echoing my earlier architectural iconography. The first sculptural work shows a dramatic shift in scale from room-sized to table-top. It is only with time that projects on a more environmental scale will take shape.

the reluctant naturalist is a survey of these varied practices. Field drawings of the Antarctic Peninsula and Palmer Research Station, collages, table-top icebergs, a room-sized mural all reflect my attempts to translate Antarctica’s richness into my own vocabulary. It is in its early days yet, and the show reflects a process; these assorted pieces are the seeds of work that I will be building on for years to come.

Oona Stern

Harpist Alice Giles Travels to Mawson Base

2010-12-18T08:40:00.000-08:00

It's great to learn that another musician is heading to Antarctica. Harpist Alice Giles has received an Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellowship to travel on the research vessel ‘Aurora’ to Mawson Base in February and March 2011.

Her trip celebrates the Centenary of the 1911-1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which was led by Australian geologist Douglas Mawson (who the base is named after). Alice will be performing and recording music that was written especially for her trip as well as music that was heard in Antarctica 100 years ago. She'll also be recording Antarctic sounds for composers and students to use in compositional projects.

Visit Alice's blog for updates on her project and adventures - http://aliceinantarctica.wordpress.com/

Good luck Alice!

Fraser's Penguins

2010-12-09T20:43:00.000-08:00

Dwindling Adélie colonies on Torgersen Island

A new book has recently been released about the plight of the Adélie penguins near Palmer Station: Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica by Fen Montaigne. In 2005 - 2006 the author spent five months at Palmer working as a research assistant to Bill Fraser, who has been studying the area's penguin populations for over 30 years. I just picked up a copy and am hoping to have a chance to read it over the holidays.

Speaking of which, if you are in need of a unique winter holiday gift/stocking stuffer, or simply have an urge to hear penguin gaks and ecstatic display calls, please consider purchasing a copy of my Antarctic field recordings cd, Chattermarks.

Happy holidays!

Live on Radio + Live on Stage

2010-12-01T23:30:00.000-08:00

Women Hold Up Half the Sky
KALX 90.7 FM
Saturday, December 4th, 11 am - noon (Pacific Time)

This Saturday I'll be on the radio doing a short live performance, playing recordings of my work and talking about my many musical projects. KALX streams live online at: http://kalx.berkeley.edu/how-listen

Tuesdays at Tom's
Tuesday December 7th, 7:30pm
3111 Deakin Street
Berkeley, CA 94705
$ donation - all proceeds go to the artists

Here is your chance to see my ensemble and I play in the intimate setting of Tom Duff's lovely living room! I can't recommend the series enough. I've heard a lot of great music at Tom's place, plus there is usually an excellent array of free snacks and drinks. Please come join us as A.L. Dentel, Felix Macnee and I perform several of my Antarctic compositions plus some improvisations. Also on the bill is the quartet of Tim Perkis, Tom Djll, Scott Walton and Matt Ingalls, who are all great players and improvisers.

Talk at the Museum of Craft and Design

2010-11-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

Next week I'll be speaking at San Francisco's Museum of Craft and Design about my work with sound in Antarctica.

Designing with Sound: Recording Antarctica
Museum of Craft and Design Speaker Series Event

499 Castro Street (at 18th Street)
Wednesday, November 17
6:30 - 8 PM
Free to members of MCD. $10 non-members, $5 students

I will share stories and images from my Antarctic music project, play samples of field recordings from Palmer Station, and demonstrate several of my Antarctic-object instruments.

The presentation will be followed by a visit to the exhibition Transference, a glass and sound installation by Andy Paiko and Ethan Rose.

* My next performance of Antarctic compositions will be Tues, December 7th in Berkeley, CA.

New Penguin Bone Instruments

2010-10-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Coracoids - Adélie penguin coracoid bones mounted in driftwood and amplified via a contact microphone wedged in the wood. The coracoid is part of the penguin's shoulder girdle and is the pivot upon which its wings turn. I have been bowing the coracoids to produce eerie, howling sounds in my new piece White on White, which evokes the rapid decline of the Adélie colonies near Palmer Station.

The Octobone - is constructed from Adélie penguin femurs and tibias, again mounted in driftwood. The instrument is miked via a hydrophone embedded inside the underside of the wood. We have been playing the Octobone percussively and making sounds that blend with recordings of brash ice melting underwater.

I didn't want to damage the bones in either of these two instruments (if they broke, replacing them would likely take several years and a lot of grant-writing). So, instead of screwing or gluing them into the base, the bones are fitted into holes carved in the wood, and strapped and wedged in place with thick thread and tiny shims. After a few carving mishaps that resulted in minor injuries I discovered work gloves and refined my technique. Now my woodworking should involve less cursing and blood. Yay! More bone instruments coming soon.

Climbing on the Antarctic Peninsula

2010-09-15T09:45:00.001-07:00

This past austral summer a French climbing team made a number of ascents of peaks along the Antarctic Peninsula, including a couple of mountains on Smith Island and Brabant Island that I sailed past on my trip.

Read about their expedition here: http://aaj.americanalpineclub.org/climbs-and-expeditions/antarctica/antarctic-peninsula/2009-10-antarctic-peninsula-summary-by-d-gildea/
Extensive photos from their adventures are posted at http://nomansland.project.free.fr/NomanslandProject-Portfolios.htm

And yes, I'm jealous!

Penguin Pieces - Live this Saturday

2010-07-28T14:57:00.000-07:00

My ensemble and I will be performing a set of my Antarctic compositions live this Saturday night in San Francisco at the Lab as part of the Soundwave 4: Green Sound Festival. We will be premiering new works inspired by Adélie penguins, scored for natural-object instruments in combination with field recordings from Palmer Station, Antarctica. This time, our instruments will be penguin bones and nesting stones, Antarctic limpet shells, rocks from Breaker Island and more.

Our concert has received a nice write-up in the SFWeekly and is a featured event. Check out the article here: http://www.sfweekly.com/events/animosity-in-the-illuminated-forest-2070655/

Please note- we are playing first so don't be late or you could miss our set. Also, many of the shows in this festival have sold out so I recommend either arriving early or purchasing advance tickets.

Animosity in the Illuminated Forest
Featuring performances by composer Cheryl E. Leonard, multi-media artist Elise Baldwin, Norwegian artist Elin Øyen Vister

BUY TICKETS: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/107343
Festival Page: http://www.projectsoundwave.com/2010/july31/
Festival website: http://www.projectsoundwave.com/

Date: Saturday July 31st, 2010
Location: The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco
Time: 7:30 Doors, 8:00 Show
Tickets: $10-15 sliding scale

Infoline: 415.320.6685 or fest@projectsoundwave.com

Artists:
Cheryl E. Leonard www.allwaysnorth.com & www.musicfromtheice.blogspot.com
Elise Baldwin http://www.clattertrap.com/
Elin Øyen Vister http://childofklang.wordpress.com & http://www.myspace.com/childofklang

Composer Cheryl E. Leonard performs music voicing the catastrophic decline of Adélie penguin colonies near Palmer Research Station in Antarctica. She will be joined onstage by A.L. Dentel, Felix Macnee and Cliff Neighbors, who will play amplified natural objects (including bones, shells and stones from Antarctica) together with field recordings from Palmer Station.

Multimedia artist Elise Baldwin presents her intermedia piece Chimera, part of the Ambit series, a group of live audiovisual turntable performances. The series focuses thematically on the circular nature of memory and the decomposition of physical presence over time.

Norwegian Sound Artist Elin Øyen Vister summons the sounndscapes and the decline of the pelagic seabirds Kittywakem Puffin and Guillemot in the Røst Archipelago in Northern Norway to our shores. With extensive time, research and recordings in the area, Vister investigates a haunting reality for the species.

Artist Talks Q&A will follow performances.

ANIMOSITY IN THE ILLUMINATED FOREST is part of Soundwave Festival ((4)), entitled GREEN SOUND running June 6 to August 13 2010. GREEN SOUND explores the natural world and environmental sustainability through innovative, interactive and experiential performances and exhibitions by over 75 local and international musicians from across the sonic spectrum (experimental to classical to popular music), sound artists, visual artists and filmmakers.

Live on Internet Radio + Touch the Gear Expo

2010-07-10T10:09:00.001-07:00

I'll be performing live on the UB Radio Salon on DFM Radio Television International, Wednesday July 14, 4-6 pm US Pacific Time.

The UB Radio Salon is two hours of live improvised music/sound art. This week guest artists Rob Wortman and I will join hosts ninah pixie and das of Big City Orchestra to explore the theme WATER ON STONE. Although our focus is not Antarctica, I will be playing my Antarctic rocks and mixing in several of my unreleased Antarctic field recordings. Tune in: http://www.dfm.nu

Archives of past UB Radio Salons (including an Antarctic-themed show I did with Anka Draugelates on 2/18/09) can be found at: http://www.ubuibi.org/radio.html.

On Sunday July 18th the Outsound New Music Summit presents the Touch the Gear Expo, in which a wide range of San Francisco Bay Area musicians allow you to try out their unusual instruments and sound-making devices/set-ups. I'll be there with a selection of my natural-object instruments including several Antarctic instruments. Here is your chance to play penguin bones, limpet shells and stones from Antarctica, plus California pinecones, driftwood, bark and more.

Touch the Gear Expo
Sunday July 18, 2010 7-9 pm
San Francisco Community Music Center
544 Capp Street at 20th Street
San Francisco
FREE!

Reminder: My next concert of Antarctic music compositions will be Saturday July 31st at the Lab in San Francisco, as part of the Green Sound Festival.

Photos from April 17th Performance

2010-05-13T11:58:00.001-07:00

Here are some images from our April 17th performance in 23five's Activating the Medium Festival at the Lab in San Francisco. Our next show will be July 31st in San Francisco.

Live video closeups of the instruments were projected behind us during the set

A.L. Dentel, Cliff Neighbors and Cheryl Leonard perform the wind piece "Greater Than 20 Knots"

Cheryl plays stone slabs from Breaker Island in "Brash Ice"

Felix Macnee on limpet shells and penguin bones in "Point 8 Ice"

Ann hangs icicles during the final piece

Ann and Cliff play beakers and petrie dishes along with drips from the melting icicles

By the end of the show the stage is covered with instruments

Photos by Randy Yau, except the last two which I took.

Penguin Pieces July 31st

2010-04-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

My next Antarctic music concert will be July 31st in ME'DI.ATE's Green Sound Festival at the Lab in San Francisco. I'll be presenting a set of pieces inspired by Palmer Station's Adélie penguins, including several world premieres.

Activating the Medium: Ice

2010-04-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

This weekend I'm part of 23five's Thirteenth Annual Activating the Medium Festival at The Lab in San Francisco.

On Friday night, fellow NSF Antarctic Artists Lisa Blatt and Michael Bartalos and I will be discussing making art in Antarctica.

Friday, April 16, doors at 8pm, panel discussion at 8:30, music at 9:15
$8 – $15 sliding scale or FREE with membership
G*Park
Joshua Churchill
Adam Sonderberg
Panel / Lecture with Antarctic artists

Then on Saturday night my ensemble (A.L. Dentel, Cliff Neighbors, Felix Macnee) and I will be performing five my Antarctic compositions, including two brand new works featuring penguin bones and icicles played live on stage. This will be your last chance to see some of these Antarctic pieces in the San Francisco Bay Area. After this show I will continue working on Antarctic compositions but I will be writing and performing a new works.

Saturday, April 17, doors at 8pm, music at 8:30
$8 – $15 sliding scale or FREE with membership
Cheryl E. Leonard
Pedestrian Deposit
Jesse Burson
Rale

The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

In Rehearsal

2010-03-31T16:02:00.000-07:00

Here are a few images from today's rehearsal. Our next performance will be in 23five's Activating the Medium Festival on April 17th in San Francisco.

Instruments for the wind piece "Greater Than 20 Knots"

Setups for the new melting glacier piece

The hanging water drippers will be replaced by icicles when we play live. In this piece water drips down into amplified glass beakers and petrie dishes. The stone slabs, from Breaker Island in Antarctica, will be played by rubbing and clinking ice across their surfaces.

Talk and Instrument Demo Thursday March 11

2010-03-09T20:46:00.000-08:00

I'll be discussing my music and demonstrating my natural-object instruments, including several built with Antarctic materials, at this week's meeting of the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group. It's free and all are welcome.

Presentations by Women Artist Technologists
Thursday March 11, 7pm
Grey Area Foundation for the Arts
55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
more details

Chattermarks Field Recordings CD

2010-02-18T11:24:00.001-08:00

Now available...
CHATTERMARKS: FIELD RECORDINGS FROM PALMER STATION, ANTARCTICA

This new CD is a collection of field recordings of Antarctic wildlife and soundscapes from my January 2009 trip to Palmer Station. Tracks include sounds from Adélie penguins, southern elephant seals, brown skuas, brash ice, icebergs, glaciers, wind, and Antarctic storms.

I went to Antarctica to develop musical compositions, but I began by simply listening. Each day, as Oona and I explored Palmer's landscapes and ecosystems, I studied and recorded the wildlife and natural sounds I encountered. Of course, some of these field recordings I am incorporating into my musical compositions, but many of them are fascinating in their own right. This album is comprised of my favorite undeveloped Antarctic field recordings and I hope you will enjoy listening to the sounds of Palmer Station as much as I did.

You can buy the CD here or through CD Baby. MP3s can be purchased through Digstation, iTunes, or CD Baby.

Special thanks to photographer Jon Brack whose images are on the cover and back of the CD. Several more of Jon's photos are inside the CD amongst the liner notes. Jon is currently working a second season down at Palmer Station. You can see more of his photographs here.

Recordings of my Antarctic musical compositions will be released in late 2010.

Activating the Medium Festival April 16-17

2010-02-13T15:16:00.000-08:00

I am excited to announce that my next concert of Antarctic compositions will be in 23Five's Activating the Medium XIII, this April in San Francisco. The theme of this year's festival is ICE, so my work should fit right in.

I'm planning to premiere three new compositions in addition to performing the pieces I have already completed. The first new work is inspired by melting glaciers and will feature icicles played live onstage. The second will be a duet for penguin bones and penguin vocalizations, and the third will combine the limpet shell instrument with recordings of underwater ice. More details coming soon...

April 16, 2010
G*Park
Joshua Churchill
Adam Sonderberg
Panel / Lecture hosted by Cheryl Leonard

April 17, 2010
Cheryl E. Leonard- Antarctic works
Pedestrial Deposit
Jesse Burson
Rale

The Lab
2948 16th Street (at Capp)
San Francisco, CA 94103

BASEbot Listening Salon Feb. 21

2010-02-13T14:58:00.000-08:00

I will be sharing my Antarctic adventures, sounds, compositions and instruments at Bay Area Sound Ecology's BASEbot 005.

SUNDAY, February 21st, 2010
2:30 pm doors, starting promptly at 3
~an hour of formal presentations followed by Q&A and mingling.

at Dan Dugan Sound Design (directions)
290 Napoleon Street Studio E, San Francisco, CA 94124

Recordist, composer and instrument builder Cheryl E. Leonard will present field recordings from Antarctica, excerpts of works composed from those recordings, and a short musical instrument demo followed by a Q&A.

If there is sufficient interest and time, afterward there will be an open-salon listening and discussion period – providing an opportunity to play your short (under five minute) sound excerpts and to discuss ideas or works in progress. We will provide a CD player and minijack hookup for iPods and the like.

The event will be recorded and made available via BASE's forthcoming podcast. I will post a link to the podcast when it becomes available.

Women in Antarctica

2010-01-12T09:10:00.000-08:00

The NSF has just posted an interesting article about the first American women in Antarctica. Check it out here.

Update/Recommended Listening and Reading

2009-12-01T15:11:00.000-08:00

I'm busy putting together a CD of my favorite undeveloped field recordings from Palmer Station, which I expect to release in January 2010. More details coming soon!
Once the field recordings CD is complete I'll focus on constructing additional Antarctic-object instruments, and writing and recording the rest of my set of Antarctic music compositions. I have three pieces finished so far, but I think there will be ten total. I'll be performing these pieces live in a series of concerts throughout 2010. Performance info will be posted here as it becomes available.

In the meantime, if you have a hankering for some stormy/icy/polar-type sounds I suggest you take a listen to the following recordings:
Jana Winderen- Heated
Jana Winderen- Submerged
Chris Watson - Weather Report
Chris Watson & BJ Nilsen - Storm
Douglas Quinn - Antarctica

And I very highly recommend Meredith Hooper's book The Ferocious Summer: Adelie Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica.

Cheers!

Underwater Video from Antarctica

2009-10-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

Henry Kaiser, a fellow Antarctic musician, just posted a beautiful video he shot while diving under the ice in Antarctica.

Antarctic Instruments Part 2

2009-10-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos of the instruments we are using in my first few Antarctic compositions.

Brash Ice

Things that produce popping, snapping, cracking, jingling, tinkling sounds a la underwater ice.

Rock slabs from Breaker Island, limpet shells, the Adelie Vertebrae Mobile, and some penguin leg bones (probably the tibiotarsus, and their rounded ends looks like they were gnawed on by skuas or some other predator).

Adelie nesting stones, granite rocks, more penguin bones (femurs), and bowls of melting crushed ice.

Greater Than 20 Knots
Airy, whistly, howly, windy instruments

The Bone Slug- two Adelie leg bones amplified via an Aquarian Audio hydrophone. Played with a violin bow or by pulling string across the bones it produces ominous low tones.

More rocks, of course! There are so many wonderful sounds you can make with them, including the delicate whistly wind that these two Adelie nesting stones emit when rubbed together in just the right way.

The Limpet Spine Instrument (now completed, except for a little cosmetic tweaking)- 10 mounted Antarctic limpet shells which are bowed and brushed with feathers for this piece. I have a whole arsenal of playing techniques that work great on this instrument and I expect to use it in several more of my Antarctic compositions.

The Adelie Synsacrum-
This is the bone at the base of the penguin's spine where the sacrum and several vertebrae are fused together.

Performer Ann Dentel demonstrates how to make gusty sounds by blowing on and through the Synsacrum.

And one more instrument that's not in a piece yet, but it most certainly will be: The Keel, an Adelie sternum bone.
And now it's time to get back to building more instruments and composing more Antarctic music...

Live on stage this Saturday Oct 10th

2009-10-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

Come see my first three completed Antarctic compositions this Saturday at Mills College. Together with musicians A.L. Dentel and Cliff Neighbors I'll be performing:

Greater Than 20 Knots- a piece inspired by the mighty Antarctic winds
Brash Ice- explores the spectrum of sounds that ice makes underwater
Lullaby for E Seals- sort of a love song for Antarctica

This will also be the concert debut of several new instruments made with materials I collected at Palmer Station, including the Limpet Shell Spine and three Adelie penguin bone instruments.

We are playing first, so don't be late!

Saturday October 10, 2009, 8pm
Littlefield Concert Hall
Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland, CA 94613
$15 general, $10 seniors and non-Mills students

NICK DIDKOVSKY, KRYS BOBROWSKI, CHERYL E. LEONARD
Breathtaking works located at the intersection of the natural world and new technologies. Nick Didkovsky performs new solo works for prepared electric guitar, electronics, and software. Krys Bobrowski's works feature everyday objects and invented instruments made from natural materials. Cheryl E. Leonard premieres compositions for amplified natural objects and field recordings from Antarctica.

Antarctic Sounds in Seattle

2009-09-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

Should you be in the Seattle area in the next couple of months you can hear some of my Antarctic field recordings accompanying an exhibition at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Selections from my recordings of Adelie penguins, icebergs, brash ice, wind and glaciers will be playing in the exhibition space.

Wonderous Cold: An Antarctic Journey
October 3 - November 29, 2009
A new exhibit at the Burke Museum of Natural History of Culture offers a glimpse at the life of researchers on the world’s most hostile continent – Antarctica – through large format photographs, displays of camp equipment, and presentations of recent research findings from the University of Washington.

And, as part of the opening day festivities I will be speaking at the museum about my adventures at Palmer Station.

Opening Day October 3rd
10:30 am - Dr. Christian Sidor, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum, will discuss two expeditions he undertook to Antarctica where he collected 245-million-year-old fossils that are now part of the Burke's collection.

11:30 am - Cheryl Leonard is a composer who visited Palmer Station last January on an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation. During her month on the ice she explored the local islands and glaciers, searching out and recording natural soundscapes. The Antarctic Peninsula in the austral summer is full of wildlife, icebergs, melting glaciers, and fascinating sounds. Leonard will share stories, photos, and unique audio recordings of wind, ice, birds, and animals from her adventures at Palmer Station.

1 pm - Dr. Eric Steig, director of the Quaternary Research Center and professor of Earth and Space Sciences, will discuss what ice core records reveal about long term Antarctic climate change.

2 pm - Thomas Tobin is a second-year graduate student in Earth and Space Sciences and Astrobiology at the University of Washington. He will discuss his field work traveling to Antarctica by boat to explore the Cretaceous Tertiary mass extinction that occurred there 65 million years ago.

Instrument Building Part 1

2009-08-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

I've been experimenting musically with the limpet shells and Adelie Penguin bones that I brought back with me from Antarctica, working to uncover the palette of sounds they contain.

My first exciting discovery: the limpet shells can be bowed. Played this way they produce clear, singing, high tones, similar to bowed glass. Each individual shell has its own pitch and I've picked out a set of shells/tones that (to my ears) work well together.

I'm eager to use the shells in a composition, but it's pretty tough to bow them while they're just lying on a table, so first I have to figure out a good way to mount them. This is a bit tricky because I don't want to do anything destructive (like drilling) to my limited supply of irreplaceable shells. Also they resonate best when held/clamped in the center of the shell (imagine a tiny cymbal), otherwise the sound vibrations are dampened and only a very dull airy tone results.

My first attempt at mounting a limpet shell worked, but was pretty ugly visually. It's just too mechanical for my taste.

I'm much happier with yesterday's second attempt, which is more organic-looking. What you see here is just a prototype. The finished instrument will have 10 shells, all mounted in a row along/above one large piece of driftwood. Time to go back to the beach in search of more thin, curved pieces of driftwood to hold all the shells in place...

Yes, I know there are no trees in Antarctica, but I've decided to use driftwood in constructing my instruments anyway. I considered other materials (metal, plastic, ceramics, non-penguin bones), but none of these would have originated in Antarctica either, and most options seemed even further removed from the natural world. At least driftwood is an organic material. It is easy to work with and the bleached forms blend well visually with the limpet shells and penguin bones. Also I like the fact that driftwood comes to us via the sea. I am reminded that the Pacific (which my local specimens travel through) extends far to south, down to where the Antarctic Circumpolar Current connects and mixes its waters with those of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It's also fun to think back in geological time to the eras (40 million plus years ago) in which trees did grow in Antarctica.

One of the instruments I am making with my Adelie Penguin bones is a vertebrae mobile. The suspended bones make delicate muted clinks, similar to some of the sounds I heard small bits of brash ice produce. Examined up close, the vertebrae have intricate structures and are quite beautiful. Many of them bring to mind tiny alien spaceships and I like the idea of taking bones from a flightless bird and making them float in the air.

This is what the mobile looks like so far, but it's not complete yet. When finished there will be 20 or more suspended vertebrae.

And now, back to work!

Antarctic Late Night Snack

2009-07-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

I am busy working on my official Antarctic musical compositions, but they are not ready to share just yet. In the meantime, here's a conceptual piece which I wrote shortly after returning from the Ice. This piece was inspired by the sounds and events of my camping trip on Old Palmer Island (see the Night of the E Seals story here). It's dedicated to Palmer Station and I'm told a copy of the score now hangs in the galley there...

Antarctic Late Night Snack

Begin with one secret island cove, whose name changes several times each year. Line its edges with slowly melting walls of ancient ice 20 to 40 feet high. Roll small crumbs of ice down the walls, jingling sparsely.

Add bergy bits and brash ice to taste and stir gently with an ebbing tide.

Place 2 to 3 small heaps of dozing Southern Elephant Seals (4 - 7 per pile) along the sides and pepper with occasional hurrumphs, sputters, snores and sighs.

For the main course throw 8 to 10 additional Elephant Seals into the water in the center of the cove and frolic freely. Periodic breathing and splashing should punctuate the night. Be sure to include a healthy dose of loud, otherworldly calls, echoing both above and below the water.

Savor up close for several hours until well after midnight. When you can no longer feel your toes retire to a cozy tent. (Be careful to avoid frostbite.) Sip hot tea nestled in a warm sleeping bag and enjoy the lingering echoes until dawn.

Cheryl E. Leonard 2/19/09
for Palmer Station

(Copyright 2009 Great Hoary Marmot Music. All Rights Reserved.)

October 10th - Save the Date

2009-07-08T07:18:00.000-07:00

I'll be premiering the first few works from my set of Antarctic compositions in October. Look for pieces inspired by brash ice, Adelies, and a lullaby for E Seals...

Music by Cheryl E. Leonard, Nick Didkovsky and Krys Bobrowski
Saturday October 10th, 8pm
Mills College Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland, CA

Mark your calendars. More details coming soon.

The Penguin Bones Are Here!

2009-05-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

Since my return from Antarctica I have been slowly sorting through the materials I collected and, of course, all my memories and experiences. I have hours and hours of audio recordings, 3500 still photos, and 20 hours of high definition video. The goal is to create a set of musical compositions with a visual accompaniment from all these media and ideas. I am very inspired to make them, but it's going to take a while.

I am happy to say that the last of my Antarctic materials arrived yesterday: my Adelie Penguin bones. Don't worry, no penguins were harmed for this project, I just collected bones I found laying around from birds that were long dead from natural causes (probably mostly those fat skuas!). Anyhow now, nearly 3 months after I left Palmer, the penguin bones have finally made their way through the maze of shipping and customs hoops and are in my possession. They join my modest collection of shells and stones, which arrived in March, and soon I will begin exploring their potential as musical instruments.

For the moment, however, I am content to just unwrap and hold them, these small pieces of evidence (they even came in plastic ziplock bags) that my Antarctic adventure really happened. Here in the midst of "normal" life in San Francisco sometimes my stay at Palmer Station seems as remote as a murky dream, and I wonder if I just imagined it all. Of course it was real, and all I need do to bring it all back is remember the feel of ice bumping against our zodiac, the smell of penguin poop, or the rumble of the glacier calving in Arthur Harbor. Plus I have all my audio, video and photography documentations to vividly jog my memory.

Still, sometimes there is nothing like touching an object actually from Antarctica to make me feel connected to this distant land.

Scott Sternbach: Antarctic Souls

2009-04-15T20:06:00.000-07:00

Fellow Antarctic Artists and Writers Grantee Scott Sternbach's photographs from Palmer Station, Antarctica are now on display at La Guardia Community College, Long Island City, New York. I strongly recommend seeing them in person if you can!

ANTARCTIC SOULS
Photographs by Scott Sternbach
April 3 - May 31, 2009, Opening reception April 16, 6-9pm

E-Building Atrium
31-10 Thomson Avenue
LaGuardia Community College
City University of New York,
Long Island City, New York 11101

You can view some of Scott's work online at: http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/ph/

Heading Home

2009-02-10T14:47:00.000-08:00

On February 9th my adventures in the south and this research phase of my project came to an end. From the Punta Arenas airport I flew north: Punta Arenas to Santiago, Santiago to Dallas/Fort Worth, Dallas/Fort Worth to San Francisco, aka home.

Now it's time to begin digesting all that I have gathered and learned so that I can make music out of it. What an amazing trip it has been!

Patagonian glaciers enroute from Punta Arenas to Santiago

Chilean Pinguinos

2009-02-08T15:24:00.000-08:00

It had not even been a week since my departure from Palmer, and only a day had passed since I disembarked from the Gould, but I had to admit that I already missed being out in a Zodiac, and I missed seeing penguins. So, as my Palmer friends departed Punta Arenas one by one, I decided to book a little tourist trip out to see some Chilean Magellanic Penguins.

Early in the morning, along with an international collection of tourists, I boarded a covered Zodiac that held around 20 people. It was quite a windy day in this part of Chilean Patagonia. Summer winds here can be so strong (often up to 60 knots!) that they will knock you over as you try to walk, and in Punta Arenas some intersections even have chains installed to keep pedestrians from being blown into the streets. And so, the tour guides explained that our boat ride out to Isla Magdalena would be a bit choppy today and they advised the weak of stomach to sit in the rear of the Zodiac. Proud to now be a bit of a boating expert, I gleefully positioned myself in the front, and smiled as the boat smacked against the wind-driven waves.
After a thrilling, butt-bruising ride we arrived at Isla Magdalena, which is part of Los Pingüinos Natural Monument. Here a large colony of over 60,000 pairs of Magellanic Penguins were breeding. As I stepped off the pier onto the island my first thought was "Wow, they smell so much better than the Adelies!" This is probably not what goes through most people's minds when they first arrive at Isla Madalena but, having never been a smoker, I possess a very sensitive nose and to me the difference in fragrance was striking (and much appreciated)!

The Magellanic Penguins were about the size of the Antarctic Adelies, and their chicks were at approximately the same adolescent stage of development as Torgersen's Adelies had been at the end of my stay at Palmer: molting off their fluffy chick coats and starting to fledge.
Instead of building a nest of stones, the Magellanic Penguins lay their eggs in underground burrows, and the island is literally covered with them.While strolling along the fenced-off pathways that lead around the island, I let the other tourists go on ahead of me, hoping for a chance to record these new penguins. Though I suspected the winds might be too strong for even my mighty Sennheiser windscreen, I pulled out my recording gear and searched for a sheltered place on this barren island where I could set up my microphones. Turns out there was no good wind shelter to be had. I tried to use my body to shield the mics, but those crafty Patagonian winds just wove their way around me. Here's a sample of the best recording I could make in these conditions.
Our next destination was Isla Marta, home to more Magellanic Penguins, cormorants (who nest in the island's cliffs), and a large colony of sea lions. As we approached the island in our boat a raucous din of sea lions groans and howls greeted us. The beach was covered with the squirming brown shapes of hundreds of sea lions and curious heads popped up out of the water next to us.

You are not allowed to land on Isla Marta (it's protected), so we hovered just offshore in our boat for a while: the tourists gawking at the sea lions and the sea lions gawking at the tourists. It must have looked pretty hilarious, as we humans took turns sticking our heads out of the open areas at the bow and the stern of the boat, and the sea lions took turns sticking their heads out of the sea, both species wondering what the other was up to.

And then it was time for the bumpy return to the mainland, followed by a van ride through wind-scoured landscapes and back into the city of Punta Arenas.

Viva la Oona!

2009-02-07T21:57:00.000-08:00

It was the morning after our arrival in port and nearly time for Oona to head to the airport and begin the series of flights that would bring her home to Brooklyn, NY. The two of us took a final stroll together through the streets of Punta Arenas, enjoying the strange mix of architectural materials and styles (including some very elegant uses of corrugated sheet metal), the abundance of unusually attractive and healthy-looking stray dogs, the now-familiar scrambled mess of overhead wiring, and other quirks and details of the city.
Even though we had been a team for the last 6 weeks, and I had lots of photos of Oona and she had plenty of me, we realized that no pictures existed of the two intrepid Artboat #66 Co-Captains together. When you consider that we had just shared an entire Antarctic adventure, this was quite ironic, and needed to be remedied before we flew off to opposite sides of North America. So, up on a hill overlooking Punta Arenas we asked a stranger to take our photo.

Oona Stern and I had been thrown together by the logistical considerations of the United States Antarctic Program. Before our arrival on station it had been decided that we would be both boating partners and roommates at Palmer, which meant that we would be spending almost all day, every day together. One Palmerite is said to have remarked: "I hope they get along, because they're really stuck with each other." It could have been a complete disaster, but instead I found that I couldn't have asked for a better adventure buddy, boating cohort, artistic accomplice, and friend. And she sure can kick my butt when it comes to throwing snowballs!

Together at Palmer we had learned to drive Zodiacs through the brash, tie up to an island, set a stern anchor, remove ice from the underside of the boat, and judge when the weather was turning. We had been honked at by penguins, squeaked at by terns, and dive-bombed by skuas; pursued by Leopard Seals, huffed at by Fur Seals, and snored at by Elephant Seals. We had descended into crevasses, circumnavigated icebergs, and gasped as ice calving from the glacier produced a wave we were certain would flip our boat (I am happy to say that it didn't. By the time the wave reached us out in deep water it just made the Zodiac bob up and down gently. Pheww!). Inside the station we had struggled to make it to the galley before hot breakfast ended, scrawled many a silly callsign on the blackboard, wondered how best to interpret all the weather charts and graphs, learned how to House Mouse and GASH, and Oona even mastered some of the finer points of Palmer's preferred card game: Australian 500. And through all this we had not just managed to get along, but been incredibly productive and rustled up a lot of fun along the way.

Thanks Captain! I hope we get to adventure together again soon...

Be sure to check out Oona's blog http://www.antarcticice.blogspot.com/ and keep an eye out for her work.

Back on Land in Punta Arenas

2009-02-06T23:56:00.000-08:00

On the morning of February 6th, having completed her passage through the Strait of Magellan, the Laurence M. Gould approached Punta Arenas. Eager to set foot on land again after 4 1/2 days at sea, many of us (especially those who had suffered from seasickness) were once more outside on the decks. I marveled at the rich green hills in the distance, the chaotic jumble of colors and forms that comprised the city, and the fact that we were no longer alone. There were many other ships in the water around us now and a whole urban world awaited onshore. What a change this would be after living in the small, vivid communities of ship and station. I wasn't sure if I was quite ready to be back in the "real world" again, but it was upon me.

Although many people describe their time on the Gould as a kind of grueling purgatory that must be endured in order to get to/from the Antarctic Peninsula, I was happy to have had shipboard segues bookending my time on the Ice. Heading south, these days in transit let me fully relish the unknown, to deliciously wonder what lay in store for me at the bottom of the world. Northbound the Gould granted me precious time in which to savor my experiences before plunging back into regular life. I almost felt sorry for people who travel to McMurdo. These folks access Antarctica from New Zealand via a military cargo plane in a matter of hours. What a rude shock it must be to drop abruptly into such drastically different environments and cultures.
As Oona and I watched, the pier grew closer and closer and then the Gould turned and slowly backed into place alongside the dock. We had finally arrived, and despite my mixed feelings about the impending end of my great Antarctic adventure, I found I really was excited about going ashore.

However, we had to wait just a little longer before we could cross the gangplank, as were not allowed to leave the ship until it was safely tied up and the Chilean immigration agents arrived onboard to stamp our passports and officially grant us reentry into their country. In the meantime I amused myself by peering out the galley portholes at Punta Arenas,
and adding a Laurence M. Gould stamp to my passport alongside the ones I got at Palmer Station. I'm not entirely sure why we are allowed to have stamps from Antarctica and Antarctic research vessels, and they hold no legal significance (remember Antarctica is a whole continent ostensibly not owned by anyone). Still, I am delighted to have passport evidence of my journey.
And then, after an hour or so, we were gleefully strolling down the pier. It was time to set foot on verdant land once again and, perhaps more importantly, to get some fresh lunch!
Stepping back onto land in the midst of "The Most Austral City in the World" my first impressions were of how busy and messy everything was: visually, sonically, aromatically. After the austere, relatively spare world of Palmer Station, and the contained realm of the ship, I was suddenly affronted by too many options. Everything seemed to mirror the confused tangle of cables suspended above our heads as my friends and I wandered up Punta Arenas' sidewalks. Whereas at Palmer there had been one bumpy, gravel "road" that ran for only a couple hundred feet, here a maze of interlaced streets stretched out before me. The city's brightly painted buildings and corrugated rooftops came from a color palate that had expanded exponentially from the whites, grays and blues that dominate Antarctic landscapes. The scents of penguins and elephant seals wafting across the water from nearby islands had been replaced by diesel and gasoline fumes, scrambled restaurant food odors, and the earthy smells of things growing in dirt and a profusion of human and animal life.

As for the soundscape: well cacophony really is the appropriate word. Engines and motors of all kinds surrounded us. Everywhere I looked the world was overrun by people: chatting, arguing, laughing, coughing, and clomping. This incredible layer of "background" noise was punctuated by the occasional doorslam, tolling churchbell, or altercation between street dogs. Even after living with the blaring drone of the ship's engines for days on end this was quite overwhelming at first. Since Punta Arenas is not even all that big of a city (around 130,000 people), I wondered how I was ever going to adapt to hearing San Francisco when I arrived home.

Luckily yummy food awaited us, and the growling of my stomach soon overrode my other senses. Even though I was a vegetarian in a place where people seem to eat a lot of meat, it was thrilling to have so many food options again. And after a month away from freshies, the fact that there were whole stores full of ripe fruit and vegetables seemed nothing short of miraculous!

In the evening, after settling into our hotels, and strolling and eating our way around town (One of my friends had 3 or 4 different lunches. All afternoon he just kept moving from one excellent restaurant to the next.), Oona and I gathered for a beer with some of the researchers from the LTER cruise. Then it was off to a final dinner with our fellow Palmerites. Tomorrow many of them, including my amazing Artboat co-captain Oona, would be jetting north or heading off to other South American adventures. I, on the other hand, would be staying in town for a couple more decompression days before flying home.

I was so excited about our desserts that I couldn't resist photographing them.

Evening in the Strait of Magellan

2009-02-05T22:08:00.000-08:00

I was thoroughly ensnared in a leather sofa and "The Lord of the Rings" when one of my birder friends rushed in the back door and excitedly announced that there was a rainbow outside. Happy to have an incentive to escape the clutches of the Gould's lounge I wrestled myself out of the sofa and climbed out onto the back deck of the ship.And there it was: a complete 180 degrees of vivid double rainbow that straddled our wake and stretched all the way across the horizon from port to starboard. We had entered the Strait of Magellan and now in the evening light I could see low-lying land on either side of us. The waters were calm and it was actually warm outside. The air was decidedly humid, something I had not experienced in 6 weeks (even right next to the sea the air in Antarctica is quite dry due to the cold temperatures), and smelled faintly of land and vegetation. We had arrived back in Patagonian summer and boy was it lovely!

As news of the rainbow traveled throughout the ship, one by one folks gathered outside on the Gould's many decks. Hermits I had not seen for days (hibernation seems to be a popular strategy for dealing with crossing the Drake) emerged and started chatting happily with their shipmates. Many of us had cameras out to photograph the rainbow, but you could only capture short segments. It was far too immense to fit even in a wide angle lens.There was a festive mood onboard and everywhere I looked people were just beaming. And why not? It was our last night on the Gould and tomorrow morning we would arrive back in port at Punta Arenas. There we would have solid ground again, beds instead of bunks, plenty of excellent restaurants to choose from (the Gould had last been supplied with fresh fruits and vegetables 6 weeks ago, and although the food onboard was OK, the vegetarian options had been less than exciting of late), and for those who like to drink, bars aplenty (the Gould is a dry ship so many folks were really looking forward to this). Some people were happy to be heading home to their families and lives in the Northern Latitudes, while others were eagerly planning adventures in Cerro Torre or other parts of Patagonia. Many of the crew would be heading back out on the Gould's next Antarctic cruise, but they were looking forward to nearly a week in port first.

To me the rainbow was a giant smile from the world. It was the perfect punctuation to mark the end of a benign crossing of the Drake, a successful journey, and a wondrous stay in Antarctica. I lingered outside, savoring the evening, as the rainbow slowly faded and a brilliant sunset took over.

Blue Skies Across the Drake

2009-02-04T11:15:00.000-08:00

After my last glimpses of Antarctica the previous night I awoke to find that we were already in the Drake Passage. But the waters were calm, and we could see blue sky! Not wanting to jinx our crossing most folks did their best to avoid saying it out loud, but I'm sure we all thought: "boy are we lucky!" Sure, the ship still swayed and bobbed to some extent, but according to Drake veterans this was incredible. The largest swells we encountered on our journey were only about 8 feet tall. As we progressed in continued extremely fair conditions, some members of the crew began to express real concern about their next voyage. At this point they had experienced 4 or 5 benign Drake crossings in a row, so surely they were due for a really nasty one...

Emboldened by the (relatively) flat water I decided to try traveling unmedicated. On the journey down I had used a Scopolamine patch but did not like how groggy it made me. It also made it difficult to focus my eyes on a computer screen. I was hoping to work a bit on the ship on my way north so this time I opted for pressure point wrist bands instead. I admit to a few instances of queasiness: there was one meal I didn't really eat (I think I tried a little bit of rice and soy sauce, then gave up and went to lie down in my bunk. This was partially a reflection of the range of vegetarian food available at this point in the cruise. The Gould hadn't been resupplied in around 6 weeks so, aside from a few withering apples, there were no fresh vegetables or fruit to be had.) and once, with some desperation I rushed to the back deck in search of a horizon line to orient myself to and, after distancing myself from the guy who was smoking out there, I did succeed in fighting back my mild nausea. Overall, however, I am pleased to report that my inner ear did fine.

As for getting work done onboard, well, I still found it difficult. The ship's engines were too loud for me to listen back to any of my recordings. Here's what they sounded like in my sleeping quarters, and in the cargo hold (turn down your volume, this one's loud!). Furthermore, the incessent mild swaying motions of the boat were better for inducing drowsiness and lethargy than inspiring intellectual brilliance. So, like many other folks onboard, I often found myself lured into the decadent leather couches of the lounge and the seemingly endless procession of DVD movies. When I got bored with Hollywood I joined Oona on the bridge, checked out our location on the nautical chart, and chatted with whatever crew member was on watch; or I went outside on the back deck and observed the retinue of albatrosses and petrels that were escorting us north.

This time Oona and I were both quartered in a berthing van down in the cargo hold. This is literally a shipping container that has been converted into living quarters for four people. It sounds like it would be an unpleasant place to call home for five days but actually it was fine, and even had a few advantages. For example, being lower and closer to the center of the ship meant we moved around less with the waves, which was a great boon if you were feeling woozy.

The berthing van, with it's metal lockers, florescent lights and curtained bunks felt very militaristic overall, but it also had some quirky details that made me laugh. First of all, the sound of the water pump was hilarious. Every time you generated enough wastewater in the bathroom the pump would kick in, making a wah-wah sound that was the perfect response to a bad joke. This never stopped amusing me.

Instead of a porthole, we had a tv monitor that let us see what was going on in several locations outside the ship. But perhaps the most amusing feature was the emergency exit, which was in the shower!

North Through the Neumayer

2009-02-02T13:46:00.000-08:00

After a late night of packing, moving, hot tubbing, and snowball-throwing contests I awoke in my bunk on the Gould at 6-something AM and climbed up onto the ship's decks to witness our departure from the station. Despite the early hour many of our Palmer friends were up to see the ship off and an impressive number of them jumped from the pier into the freezing cold ocean as the Gould pulled away ("Plunging" upon the Gould's departure, especially when she is traveling north, is a long-standing Palmer tradition).As we headed away from Anvers Island and the brash ice closed back in behind the ship, I silently said my goodbyes: first to the remaining Palmerites, then to the station itself, to all my favorite local islands and the creatures and sounds they hosted, to the Palmer Safe Boating Area, and finally,to the last vistas of this small piece of Antarctica I had called home.People who have spent significant time in Antarctica often say they leave a part of themselves on The Ice (which goes a long way towards explaining why so many staff, scientists, and explorers seek to return year after year). I think that you leave a part of yourself behind at the conclusion of any great adventure. For me this is usually somewhat melancholy but I am often able to temper my sadness with thoughts of visiting again someday, or dreams of my next big endeavor. Neither of these tactics were working for me now. I knew how very unlikely it was that I would ever see Palmer Station again. It's just such a remote place, with so few ways to get there. It was easy to list them all off in my head and see how implausible they were for me: cruise ship, private yacht, another grant, or a support job. Furthermore I had no idea what my next adventure would be. And even if I had had something in mind, how could I possibly top a month in Antarctica?! So it was with a real sense of loss that I stood on deck and watched this small, but incredibly rich, part of my life recede into the distance.

Fortunately it was turning out to be a beautiful fair-weather day and we were about to sail through the Neumayer, a narrow channel framed on either side by rugged peaks and glaciers. Thus it was simply not possible to remain mournful for very long. The view just became too stunning, and Antarctica herself cheered me right up with an amazing display of icy and mountainous delights.A couple of hours later we left the channel and the waters opened up into the wider Gerlache Strait, but all day long the panoramas remained phenomenal.

Sometimes in the distance it was hard to tell the difference between giant icebergs and islands.

(left big bump= iceberg, right three bumps= islands)

Eventually we left the mainland behind and aimed towards the South Shetland Islands. There, in the wee hours of the night, the Gould would be stopping to pick up some Polish geologists from Arctowski Station on King George Island. I debated whether or not I should get up at 2 AM to see this, but several jam-packed days in a row had left me completely exhausted and I concluded that a good night's sleep was more important. We'd be starting across the Drake Passage tomorrow and who knew what it might have in store for us.Before I wandered off to bed I watched my last Antarctic sunset... at least on this trip.

Closing Adventure

2009-02-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

It was my last day at Palmer Station. I awoke to find the Laurence M. Gould tied up once again at Palmer's pier and the transfer of cargo and people already in full swing. The ship and her scientists and crew had just spent the last month cruising around the Western Antarctic Peninsula conducting research for the Long Term Ecological Research Network. You can read about their trip here. It was fun to meet up again with the ship people, who I had traveled down with, and trade our tales of adventure. I was a bit jealous when I heard how much of the peninsula they had seen and how far south the ship had ventured, but in the end I was glad to have spent my time in Antarctica getting to know one area more in depth.

Of course I had ambitious ideas about what to do with my final day on station. I dreamt of one last grand boating tour with Oona: a sunshiny beautiful day in which we would visit all our favorite islands, happen upon a large group of Humpback Whales, find E Seals vocalizing underwater, end up in just the right place to view a very large section of ice calving from the glacier, and get chased by one more Leopard Seal. But first I had a million chores to do. I needed to pack up all my gear and "samples" (the penguin bones, limpet shells and rocks I had collected to use as instruments back home), clean out my lab space and dorm room, and move all my things onto the ship. In sympathy with the tasks ahead of me, the day began snowy and windy. This was bad for my fantasy, but made the reality of working inside a little less painful.

Unfortunately packing and cleaning consumed all of my morning and most of the afternoon. In fact I was still not finished when, late in the afternoon, Oona came up to me and suggested we take a walk in the Backyard before it was time for the big pig roast/Super Bowl party scheduled to take place that evening (Being a vegetarian and not into football, on the surface I could have cared less about the party. I did, however, want the chance to hang out with my Palmer friends one last time, so I was planning on attending at least some of it.). The weather was still not great for boating so I let the last tattered remnants of my zodiac fantasy go and we headed up the rocky edge of Hero Inlet on foot.
Oona wanted to go take a closer look at the glacier arch near the head of Hero Inlet. Suddenly I realized I had not seen the arch since my very first walk in the Backyard, the day I arrived at Palmer. How was this possible? It was only a 10 minute walk away. Of course the answer was that, even within the limited area which one is allowed to explore around Palmer Station, there were still just way too many things to see, and hear, and experience, and ponder. This is even more the case once you start attending to any of the millions of minute details: the tiny crystalline fractures within a piece of melting glacier firn, changes in the sound of penguin footsteps, how the shapes of the brash ice and the rocks along the shore parallel each other, what 20-knot winds feel like against your face, and all the other particulars that define this place at this point in time.

One month was not enough. You could spend a whole lifetime here and still not really understand this tiny corner of Antarctica. I desperately wanted more time: another month, another week, even just one more sunny day. But my time was nearly up. Tonight I was going to have to cross the gangway onto the Gould and go to sleep in my new shipboard bunk. And early tomorrow morning we would pull away from the station, and begin our journey north: along the Antarctic Peninsula, across the Drake Passage and then back to Punta Arenas, Chile.

It was still grey and snowing intermittently, which echoed my melancholy mood. Oona and I scrambled along the rocks at the edge of the water: one last Palmer adventure for the two Captains (as teammates on our zodiac we had decided that we were both Captain of our little boat). The waters of the inlet were very calm, and were it not for the hum of the Gould's engines in the background, it would have been unusually quiet in this sheltered area. Across the water a couple of seals slept on granite slabs, and a cormorant wandered across our path. Near the arch several small icebergs (I think technically I should call them bergy bits) floated: crackling, clinking and clunking in the shallow, still water. The ship sounds were too loud to record anything in the air, so I dropped my hydrophones into the inlet. Here's a sample of what I heard.

Oona moved closer to examine the deep azure scallops and curves on the underside of the arch. The cormorant flew across in front of my face and splashed down into the inlet a few feet away from me. Water dripped and dribbled from the melting blue arch. And I sat and savored every last minute.

Last Chance for E Seals

2009-01-31T16:12:00.000-08:00

"E Seal" is Palmer slang for Southern Elephant Seal. In this part of Antarctica we also have "Leps" (Leopard Seals), "Chinnies" (Chinstrap Penguins), "S**t Chickens" (Sheathbills), and about a million acronyms (the USAP, United States Antarctic Program, just loves acronyms, plus Palmer has it's own station-specific collection). Of course I have developed my own affectionate terms for the local wildlife. These include: "Little Stinkers," (Adelie Penguins), "Big Stinkers" (E Seals), and some very impolite words for one particular Skua that dive-bombed my head every time I visited Old Palmer Island.

Anyhow, the E Seals seem to have a bit of a bad reputation. Some people even refer to them as filthy and disgusting. I admit, sometimes they do emanate a very unpleasant aroma (I'll refrain from detailing why, in case you were thinking about eating while reading this), and they do often snort and fart loudly while snoozing on the shore. On the other hand, E Seals can be very cute (just look at the picture of a young male above!), they have the most charming smiles - especially when resting, they are willing recording and photography subjects, and they make some truly outrageous sounds. From the very first time I encountered them I have been fascinated by the E Seals. Therfore this is a post in praise of Palmer's Southern Elephant Seals, and here are a few stories from my time with them...

1. First Encounters

My introduction to E Seals occurred on one of our early zodiac outings. Oona, Jon Brack and I motored over to "The Cove" (AKA "Lover's Lane," "Sheathbill Cove" or "Jeff's Unnatural Obsession") at Old Palmer Island, a hidden circle of sheltered water surrounded by two giant melting pieces of glacial ice which were once part of the Marr Ice Piedmont. As we turned off the zodiac's engine and slowly drifted across the water a glacier calved in the distance and deep alien bellows and cries began to emerge from the far end of the cove, echoing between the 30-foot tall walls of ice on either side of us. There, in the water, a couple of dark shapes tumbled and splashed. Several more large creatures lay side-by-side on the shore.
Ah, so these were E Seals... Their calls and interjections, so foreign from my own voice (and indeed most of the sounds I have ever worked with), instantly drew me to them. Quickly I pulled out my Edirol point-and-shoot recorder and started taping. After a few short minutes the mysterious sounds ended abruptly and much too soon to satisfy my now burning curiosity. Suddenly I wanted to learn all about these strange beasts, and I was desperate to hear more of their vocalizations.

Thus began my quest to record the E Seals, which I must admit became a bit of an obsession. Having captured a short sample of the seal's rowdy voices I was determined to record them again, and to get longer, better-quality audio of them with my fancy Sennheiser microphones. Plus, who knew what other weird and wondrous noises they might make... My mind reeled with the exciting possibilities.

I began making frequent trips out to Old Palmer Island, hoping to hear the raucous howling again, but to no avail. Each time I journeyed out to record the E Seals I found them fast asleep. It was miraculous how close I could get to the seals as they slumbered (this resulted in several fine recordings), and their snoring and deep-breathing were interesting noises in themselves, but these were not really the sounds I was searching for. To make matters worse, a friend at the station told me that E Seals vocalize underwater as well, when they are playing in the ocean. Now I was just dying to hear what that would sound like! During my first three weeks at Palmer Station again and again I returned to "The Cove," looking for E Seals swimming in the water, but I always found them piled up on the shore, totally conked out.

2. Night of the E Seals

During this time I had also been wanting to do some camping. After all, how could I go all the way to the bottom of the world and not sleep out, at least for one night? Also, I must admit, I've always possessed a secret desire to have my own island and now here was my big chance to be the only human on an island in Antarctica. But, being Antarctica, it was particularly important (and desirable, especially for recording) to have a good weather window in which to camp: two days in a row of no precipitation and calm winds. Even in the heart of Antarctica's summer this is not a common occurrence. Each morning I eagerly consulted the forecast, hoping for a friendly prediction. Finally the weather gods smiled and I saw my chance. So one balmy evening, a few hours before sunset, I was dropped off on Old Palmer Island.

Shortly after the zodiac's motor faded into the distance, and before I even had a chance to leave my drop off point and head across the island, I heard it: the faint bawls and bellows, splashes and sputters, of E Seals in the water! And this time it wasn't just a couple of them cavorting. I peered around the rocky outcropping and there they were: over a dozen Southern Elephant Seals, sparring in pairs in the shallow water. The combination of their playful martial dances and eerie roars was mesmerizing. I watched, and listened, and recorded their sounds for an hour or two. I could hear other seals farther away as well, both E Seals and some other kind that produced high-pitched barking sounds (it was probably a fur seal). Often a dialog seemed to be taking place between the different groups and I wondered what they were conversing about.

Now these seals I was observing were not the ones in "The Cove," which was all the way over on the other side of the island, and as time went by I got to wondering if my sleepy cove buddies might also be romping in the water. It was now getting rather late in the day, maybe around 10pm, and dusk was settling in. My camping gear lay, ignored and still in my pack, on the ground in front of me. I wanted to rush right over to "The Cove" but common sense kicked in and I forced myself to put up my tent first. From my campsite in the middle of the island I could hear the cove seals frolicking. "Oh please," I thought, "don't stop before I can get over there!" Twenty minutes later, my home-for-the-night in order, I ran across the darkening island.

There was still plenty of action going on in the cove. E Seal heads popped up and tails disappeared below the surface. Sounds of splashing and breathing traveled across the flat water to me and my microphones. Occasionally a pair of seals would face off, their torsos rising out of the water as they roared and wrestled. Others somersaulted and turned circles, while a few sleepyheads dozed upon the shore. All these sounds bounced off the ice cliffs, which amplified them in the still night. Wow. Here's a small sample of what I heard.

I didn't think the experience could get any better, until I noticed that once in a while strange gurgling tones were rising up from near my feet. I was standing next to one of the decaying ice cliffs and at first I thought these sounds were just some odd permutation of a glacier meltwater stream. However, they were occurring very infrequently. In fact I only heard them a handful of times during the several hours I stayed at the cove that night, and this made me wonder if perhaps they were not being generated by the glacier at all. After the third or fourth time the unusual burbling happened suddenly it dawned on me: these were the underwater vocalizations of the E Seals. They were traveling across the cove through the water to the ice, which was then reflecting them up into the air right next to me.

I stayed as long as I could, recording hours of audio, until at some point in the dead of night my toes felt like ice sculptures and I began to worry about frostbite. And then, the merriment still underway, I carefully made my way back to the tent and my not-so-warm sleeping bag. As it turned out, I needn't have been in such a hurry to reach the cove. The E Seals kept at it all night.

3. Last Chance Seals

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before I camped out that the E Seals might be nocturnal. Duh, of course they were! And now the fact that they slept all day made perfect sense. I'd be tired too after frolicking in the ocean all night long. I was very happy with the audio recordings I got that night. They just might be the best recordings of my entire trip and I can't wait to have the time to listen back to them all. I only had two regrets about that night: I was so transfixed with the sounds I had heard that I had taken no images (photo or video) at all of the E Seals playing in the water, and I had not been able to force myself to stop recording in the air and switch to recording with my hydrophones underwater (the air sounds were just too good, I didn't want to miss any of them). Thus, I wanted to go back to "The Cove" at night one more time and try to fill in these two small gaps.

Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of days left at Palmer. Suddenly time was short and there were so many things I wanted to record and experience before my stay came to an end. I searched in vain for another good weather window for camping. Today was my second-to-last day at the station and sadly now I know I will not be camping again here. The Gould is arriving tonight. I must pack and get ready to move onto the ship, and soon I will be heading home. Nevertheless I still thought it might be possible to catch the E Seals one final time, on an evening zodiac outing right at the very end of boating hours (9:45 pm these days).

So Louise (read her blog from Palmer Station here) and I set out after dinner. Our call name for the foray was "Last Chance Seals." It was a lovely, quiet evening. Normally in these conditions I would have expected to hear some noises coming from Elephant Seal Rocks as we loaded up the boat. Hmm, there was nothing. Maybe it was too early. No matter, we still had some time. First we cruised over to "The Cove" where it turned out that the waters were empty and the E Seals snored away onshore. Louise suggested we peek around the corner. We found no E Seals there, but a curious Leopard Seal swam right up to us and passed under our boat a few times. It was the closest I ever got to a Lep. Pretty amazing. Here's a short video clip of the Lep.

Next we motored over towards Humble Island where another group of E Seals usually congregates. They were strangely absent, but again we encountered other seals. This time two little fur seals came out to meet us and proceeded to flip and somersault a few feet from our boat. Yippee!

We tried a couple other E Seal haunts, but never found any in the sea. We didn't even see many on land, so I wonder where they all were. Maybe off eating somewhere? Still, the evening was beautiful, the company was great, and as the sun approached the horizon and Louise and I headed back to the station, I was glad I had gone out. I had my last chance seals, they were just not the ones I thought I was looking for that night.

And so I will have to be content with the recordings that I already have. This is fine, really, because they are very exciting and I am eager to work with them. Soon I will be leaving the realm of the E Seals, but I will always think fondly of them. Long may they sleep in piles upon the beach, gambol merrily in the sea, and grunt, howl, gurgle, belch and fart!

Antarctic Instruments

2009-01-30T23:39:00.000-08:00

During my stay at Palmer Station I have gathered some natural objects to bring home with me (normally removing materials from Antarctica is prohibited but I have a permit from the NSF to take them as part of my project). I've packed a box full of my "scientific samples" and am shipping them back to California. Once I am back in my studio I will amplify these materials and experiment with playing them in various ways to see what kinds of musical voices they contain. Some of the objects will be played "as is" and some will be used as building materials for new instruments I will be constructing the months ahead.

Here's what I'm bringing back with me:

Limpet Shells

On my very first excursion out into Palmer's chaotic, rubble-strewn backyard I found a few scattered limpet shells amongst the rocks. I had wondered if I'd find any shells around Palmer and here were some already on my first day. What luck! Delighted, I grinned like a small child in a treasure hunt and greedily gathered up all the shells I could find, which was about 5 or 6. They clinked and jingled as I turned them over in my palms and wobbled them on a flat granite slab. "Ah ha," I thought, "and they are musical too!" I excitedly returned to the station to show off my find. Strangely folks did not seem all that impressed. I thought this a bit odd because I had walked all over the backyard and had only been able to find a few of the shells. Therefore, surely they must be a rare and glorious find.

Shortly thereafter I went on a boating excursion to DeLaca Island. As soon as I scrambled up onto the island's stony ramparts I was greeted with the motherlode of limpet shell collections: all over DeLaca's rocky ledges shells were piled up by the thousands. Suddenly I understood people's lack of enthusiam about limpets- they were everywhere.
As it turns out Antarctic limpets (Nacella concinna) are very common in the Antarctic Peninsula. They are found in shallow waters and are an important food source for gulls and sea stars. The giant piles of limpet shells that I saw were the remains of many, many Kelp Gull meals. Apparently the gulls swallow the limpets whole and then regurgitate the shells. Another cool limpet fact: if they don't end up as food, limpets can live to be a hundred years old. In contrast to other kinds of limpets, Nacella concinna grows very slowly and there is concern that as water temperatures rise in the region these limpets will have difficulty coping (Read more here). So, perhaps someday it really will be difficult to find limpet shells near Palmer, but for now, they are everywhere.

Nonetheless, I remain excited about the musical potential of the limpets. Their shells produce clear, ringing pitches and I look forward to playing with them. By the way, I did look long and hard for other kinds of shells, but even though I know there are other shelled critters living in this part of the Southern Ocean I never found any on land. Maybe I need to take up Antarctic diving...

Stones

I must admit that over the last few years I have become quite the rock collector. Often it's the color, an unusual pattern, polish or shape that attracts me. Other times a reflection of light or metallic glitter catches my eye. And sometimes it's the sound: the melodious clatter of a dislodged stone as it falls or a sonorous chiming underfoot as I walk across loose scree. I have gathered stones from two islands here in Antarctica, Torgersen and Breaker, both home to strikingly musical rocks.

Soon after my arrival on station Jon Brack (cargoperson and photographer- check out his photos of Palmer here.) told me about some pitched rocks he'd found on Breaker Island. He had discovered a stone wall with loose sections that could be rattled to make melodies. Of course I was intrigued and, eager to hear them myself, I planned a trip as soon as possible. Because the tie-up point on Breaker is often exposed to large ocean swells, it can be one of the more difficult islands to land on. It took a little while to find a day when visiting Breaker was possible but finally, one grey afternoon when it was threatening to rain, a small group of us made it out there.

Even in the misty, threatening weather this small island was fascinating. The boat tie-up point was on a nearly vertical wall that we had to climb up carefully, lest we slip and fall into the cold, deep waters below. We emerged onto Breaker's top between two Giant Petrel nests and then wandered off across the island to an area full of pools, whose intriguing angled shapes resulted from the way the island's rock fractured. This granitic rock tended to break off in plates which were often resonant and pitched, and there were many rock faces with loose pieces that made interesting sounds. Jon and I searched for the specific wall he had played previously, but it was not to be found. Perhaps the rock pieces had broken off since his earlier visit. Our trip was still a success though, because during our quest we came across a number of other locations that were playable and found many good-sounding loose rocks. I later went back to Breaker, did some improvising at some of these sites, and gathered a small set of pitched Breaker stones to bring home.

The other rocks I have are from Torgersen, site of several Adelie Penguin colonies and land of the musical penguin footsteps (see the January 23rd entry below). This island has the most interesting spiny-shaped rocky outcroppings. And it is full of wonderfully melodious stones.
The number of Adelies nesting on Torgersen each year has been decreasing rapidly (read more about it here and here) and it is easy to pick out the areas that used to house colonies. The Adelies build their nests out of small stones, so large piles of these polished, much-handled rocks indicate where a colony used to be. It is sad to look around the island and see so many of these abandoned sites and to know that most likely within the next 10 years Adelies will no longer be nesting on Torgersen or anywhere in the Palmer area.
I have a small handful of stones from one of these sites. They chime like little pieces of glass.

Adelie Penguin bones

Scattered among the rocks of many of the islands I often found small white bones, usually the remains of Adelie Penguins. On Torgerson, and other islands where Adelies nest, remains are readily found on the outskirts of colonies. Here skuas have staked out territory and are on the lookout for weak chicks or injured adults that they can attack and eat.

Being a bit squeamish about dead things I only collected bones that were already clean and mostly bleached by the sun. I have a lot of them, maybe close to 100 pieces. Once they arrive back in San Francisco I'll be building instruments out of them. Stay tuned in the coming months to see and hear what I construct.

Another Crevassing Day

2009-01-30T23:00:00.000-08:00

“Let’s go crevassing again” (sung to the tune of “Let’s do the time warp again” from the Rocky Horror Picture Show) repeated merrily in my head as I hiked up the glacier one more time, excited to have a second opportunity to record inside an Antarctic crevasse. Having had some technical difficulties on our first expedition (see Crevassing Day January 27th below) due to an abundance of dripping icicles that made hanging inside the crevasse strongly resemble taking a shower, this time I was hoping to find a crack in the ice that might be a bit drier.

Theoretically such a crevasse would be wider and/or have walls that were less overhanging. Given that it was the middle of the Antarctic summer and we were headed up a melting glacier in a part of the world where the climate is getting markedly warmer and wetter, I knew it was a bit silly to hope for a dry crevasse. However, maybe we could find one in which the weather was more like intermittent sprinkles than a heavy downpour. On our previous trip I had heard some amazing sounds down inside the ice, but had been unable to record them properly. Now I had another chance, and I was thrilled.
Paul and Alden from Palmer’s Glacier Search and Rescue team accompanied Oona and myself, as we left the safe area of the glacier. Our path led out into a maze of giant cracks which terminate in a chaotic ice cliff where house-sized blocks of ice periodically fall off into the sea. Fortunately we were not going that far. The plan was to stay safely near the periphery of the maze and search for a nice wide crack into which Oona and I could descend.
As our route intersected with each new crevasse we cautiously probed it's edges. Often the real extent of a crevasse is concealed by snow on the glacier's surface and you cannot tell where the solid ice ends and a gaping maw begins without literally feeling the edge, by poking down into the snow with your ice ax. Once we ascertained where it was safe to step, we peered over the lip to see if it might be an inviting place in which to lower a composer and an artist. If it wasn't, then we carefully stepped or leaped across and continued on. After about half an hour we found a new crevasse that was big enough to explore.
This crack was about the same width as the one we had entered previously, but the walls were more parallel and it looked deeper, much deeper. Paul lowered me in first and as my descent sent snow and ice into the abyss I heard it bouncing and echoing for a surprisingly long time. Looking past my boots I could see down at least 50 feet, but I could hear that things were falling significantly further. Though there were some drops of water coming down inside this blue portal, it was much less drippy than our first crevasse. I maneuvered into a position that shielded my equipment from most of the wetness and settled in to listen and play.
First I just recorded the sound of the water drips. Then I started playing around with some nearby icicles. I had brought a pair of superball mallets down with me and as I cautiously tapped them against the icicles lovely clear pitches emerged. I was reminded of stories I had heard of people playing music on stalactites in limestone caves. Apparently in the past this has been quite a tourist attraction in some caves. However, sometimes the vibrations from the music caused the stalactites to break off. This was terrible because these mineral deposits take hundreds of years to form, and thus are virtually irreplaceable. Unfortunately I discovered that the same thing tended to happen with icicles (although they are a much more renewable resource). Just as I would start to get a nice resonant tone from one it tended to fracture and then fall, shattering in the icy depths beneath me (listen to an example here). This made me quite sad as, though I knew they would grow back in a few days, I hated the fact that I was destroying the icicles by playing them. Thus I soon gave up striking the icicles and tried a few experiments with hydrophones in the ice walls instead. The results, however, were not interesting, and then it was time for Oona to join me in the crevasse.

Oona was lowered down about 20 feet away from me. As she decended I recorded the falling snow and ice that accompanied her. I enjoyed the sounds so much that I then asked Paul to knock down some more for me to record (here is what it sounds like). Although this was also a destructive sound, it was fascinating, and chaotically musical. I soothed my slightly guilty conscience with thoughts of how quickly the hanging ice would be replaced, and the knowledge that this whole section of the glacier was melting away anyway.

It was great to look across within this beautiful, secret, cold, blue world and see my friend Oona. Most people will never experience the inside of a crevasse, or if they do it is alone and under much more dire circumstances. I felt very lucky to be there in pursuit of music and to be able to share the experience with another artist.

All of a sudden, after more than an hour inside the ice, I realized how cold and wet I had become. Despite my best efforts, my field recorder and camera had water pooling on them. Frankly I was amazed they were both still working and had not shorted out long ago. Also, an inconveniently placed drip had been slowly soaking my underwear for some time and now I really was quite chilled. It was time to ascend. With only a couple of days left at Palmer I knew this would be my last Antarctic crevassing foray, but I had managed to record some good sounds this time so I was content to go. I said a silent farewell to the icicles and mysterious depths and climbed to the surface.

Snowy Morning

2009-01-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

Today I awoke to a landscape draped in white and large wet snowflakes drifting down from the sky. They thumped gently upon the corrugated metal roof below my window, and occasionally collided with the glass pane making soft plopping sounds. The world outside brought to mind some kind of Bing Crosby Christmas fantasy and, looking out at Palmer’s potpourri of shipping containers, exposed pipes and rubbly driveways, I was reminded of how a layer of fresh snow can make almost anything look beautiful.

By mid-morning the sun was starting to peek out and Oona and I decided to take our zodiac to Dead Seal Island, near the periphery of the Palmer Safe Boating Area. It was cold enough that the snow had actually accumulated and several inches of fluffy whiteness rested atop everything. A large amount of brash ice had made its way over towards Palmer and it too was covered. The water looked like someone had strewn giant puffballs of cotton across it. Midway through the ice, we stopped to take a closer look. In between the soft, white-clad pieces of ice was a layer of snow floating atop the salt water. We were surrounded by a giant ocean slushy.

I eagerly threw my hydrophones overboard to have a listen, while Oona made a drawing of the curious shapes. The floating snow and ice was creating a hypnotic rhythm as it rose and fell with the ocean swells (here's what it sounded like), and I could easily have spent several hours happily floating in its midst.

We had barely left the zodiac parking lot and yet here was something worthy of serious investigation. Abandoning our original plan we lingered in the brash ice, adrift with our engine turned off. Sometimes the greatest wonders can be found in your own front yard (or front ocean, as the case may be).

Fluffy, snow-covered pieces of brash ice in a slurry of floating snow

Later the floating snow morphed into these micro pancake-ice shapes

Crevassing Day

2009-01-27T18:04:00.000-08:00

Here at Palmer Station today was Crevassing Day. This is a special holiday in which artists are lowered inside an Antarctic crevasse in celebration of the internal sounds of glaciers and the deeper hues of blue. It is also traditional to mix in a little ice climbing and icicle banging to help cultivate a festive mood. Here’s how we observed Crevassing Day in our part of the world…

Oona and I had both wanted to descend into a crevasse as part of our projects here in Antarctica. I wanted to try recording literally inside the glacier and Oona was interested in seeing the shapes, layers and colors within the ice. A few days ago members of Palmer’s GSAR (Glacier Search and Rescue) team scouted out a likely crevasse for us to visit. When they returned from their foray wearing huge smiles, even though they had completely missed dinner, I knew we were in for something special.

This morning began like all others here: with a look out our bedroom window at current weather conditions, breakfast, and then the ritual reading of the day’s official forecast. The sun was shining, I could see the peaks on the horizon (always a good sign), and it wasn't supposed to rain until late afternoon. After monitoring the wind speed for a bit we got the go ahead from Paul, the head of GSAR. Crevassing Day was on.

Four of us hiked up the glacier to the edge of the flagged safe zone, and then donned our climbing harnesses and tied in as a rope team for the short trip out to the crevasse (you must travel roped together across any section of glacier that might contain hidden crevasses so that if someone falls in their teammates can catch them and help extricate them). Once in the safe zone, that had been probed and marked in advance by GSAR, we were free to unrope and prepare for the day's adventure. Andy set up anchors in the ice and cleared the lip of the crevasse of extra snow and ice that might fall on us, while Paul helped Oona get ready to be lowered inside her first crevasse.

Once she was a few feet down Oona kept mentioning how wet it was in there, and sure enough, as I peered over the lip, I could see hundreds of dripping icicles. This was not like any crevasse I had visited previously on mountaineering trips up frozen peaks. This was an ornate blue cavern with more than a passing resemblance to a limestone cave full of stalactites. Wow. And accompanying this elaborate visual display were the sounds of a multitude of water drops falling into the depths of the glacier. This crevasse didn't look like much from the outside, just a gap in the snow, but it contained a whole other world.

Oona shot photographs in the "rain" and attempted a drawing on waterproof paper. Then she was prussiking up the rope and it was my turn to descend.

First I thought I'd try recording the drips while hanging in my harness just over the lip of the crevasse, but above most of the deluge, so as to keep my equipment dry as long as possible. Then I asked Andy to try kicking some snow and ice over the edge. It was great to hear the echos and spatial movements of the falling matter and pieces of ice sounded like a xylophone as they bounced off giant icicles on the way down.

Emboldened by these experiments I decided to try recording deeper, even though the water was really coming down in there. I knew I'd be taking a risk pulling out several thousand dollars worth of recording equipment while hanging on a rope in the "rain", but I couldn't resist. At about 25 feet down I came to rest on a sloping ledge and put an ice screw into the wall on which to hang my backpack full of gear. I pulled out my condenser microphones (somewhat shielded from the water inside a windscreen), recorded more dripping, and then started tapping some of the giant icicles that surrounded me with my ice ax. Just as I was starting to get a feeling for how I might improvise something interesting on the icicles the melodic feed coming from my mics was overtaken by a horrible static. It turns out water had gotten inside my cable and shorted out the phantom power coming from my recorder. I quickly turned everything off and put my soggy mics back in the pack.

Word came down from above that the weather was worsening on the surface and it would soon be time to go. I was now really soaked, and pretty concerned about my equipment, but I thought I'd just try one more quick experiment before calling it quits. I wanted to embed my hydrophones in the ice walls and then try playing the ice. I made a few attempts to mount the hydrophones, but they just kept sliding out. Hmm, ice is really slippery. Meanwhile more and more water was coming down. Small streams of it were draining off my helmet and a few drops had made their way inside the bag holding my field recorder. It was clearly time to stop for the day, leave this azure wonderland, and return to the station where dry clothes, fresh cookies and hot drinks awaited us. Perhaps there will be a chance to visit the crevasse one more time before we leave and I can try recording again on a colder, drier day...
Thanks to Paul and Andy for facilitating Crevassing Day, and to Oona for the last three photos in this post.

Adelie Footsteps and Sleeping Seals

2009-01-23T17:26:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of sounds I mentioned earlier.

First, here is an Adelie Penguin's footsteps as he (or she) walks across the tinkly, chiming rocks of Torgersen Island. The island is covered in these unusually resonant stones. The Adelies build their nests out of Torgersen's smaller rocks, and the penguins have been using and reusing these for so many years that the stones are polished from wear. The larger rocks that lie along the penguin paths have also been worn down by the birds, their edges smoothed and rounded from all the foot traffic. I have gathered a few of these musical penguin path rocks to bring back with me to California (normally removing materials from Antarctica is not allowed, but I have permission to take a few objects for my project). Ultimately I'll be using these rocks as instruments in live performances of the music I create for this project.

To record the Adelie footsteps first I had to observe them for a while to figure out where they were going and realize that they have distinct routes they prefer to use between their colonies and the ocean. I tried to select a location that was on one of these paths, but not too close to either destination, as I wanted to minimize the background squawking and surf sounds in the recording. I staked out one of the paths, setting my mics up right next to it, and then positioned myself about 25 feet away so that my human presence wouldn't worry the Adelies and make them decide to choose a different route. My fake fur-covered microphone (aka Yeti) didn't seem to bother the penguins. Every so often one would amble right past it. Over the next few days I'm hoping to stake out the Adelie paths out some more, because I still don't quite have the footsteps recording I'm looking for.

Secondly, here is a recording of some Southern Elephant Seals over on Old Palmer Island. There are several groups of these seals that like to haul out and nap on Old Palmer. I've been spending the most time with the seals that haunt a cove known as Lover's Lane, Sheathbill Cove, or Jeff's Unnatural Obsession, depending on who you are talking to (Now I know the story behind the cove's multiple names... People at Palmer had been referring to the cove as Lover's Lane, but Jeff was displeased with this title. He rallied for there to be a vote to select a name for the cove. I think Sheathbill Cove won, or maybe that was the name Jeff preferred. Anyhow, because Jeff had made such a big deal out of the naming process, folks started referring to it as Jeff's Unnatural Obsession.).

This recording was made right at the edge of the cove. Behind me was a dripping, melting, orphaned remnant of glacier that used to be connected to the Marr Ice Piedmont. In front of me was a very large sleeping Elephant Seal. In fact, I had to tiptoe past him to get to my recording position next to the ice, which I was sure would shelter my microphones from the gusty winds that were blowing that day. Before I decided to sneak by the gargantuan seal I thought long and hard. I had heard that Elephant Seals weren't bothered much by the presence of humans. Supposedly you could walk right up to them and they would just continue sleeping. I'd never been this close to such a hefty creature though, and what might happen, should he suddenly awake, gave me pause. Plus, beyond the possibility of bodily harm, I wanted to honor the Antarctic Conservation Act - we are not supposed to get so close to the wildlife that we cause them to change their behavior. I weighed these considerations against my very strong desire to record the seals, which was only possible if I could make it past him and out of the wind. Finally, after working out an emergency exit strategy that involved running and scrambling over glacial moraine while carrying nearly $5000 of recording equipment, I held my breath and ninjaed past the slumbering beast.
Luckily he remained sound asleep, and you can hear his long, slow, deep breaths in the recording. The crazy sqwonking sounds that are also on there were produced by a couple of other Elephant Seals, farther away, that seemed to be having a small altercation, or maybe they were just pleasantly chatting about the weather. Sadly I do not speak Southern Elephant Seal. Though after listening to their strange alien voices for several weeks now, I really do wish I could understand them.

Questions Answered

2009-01-18T08:29:00.000-08:00

I have a few questions to answer from my friend Olivia. Please feel free to ask questions about my Antarctic adventure, either in the comments area or via email and I will do my best to answer them when I get a chance.

Adelie Penguins on Torgersen Island

Q: How many kinds of penguins have you seen?

A: So far I have seen all three kinds of brush-tailed penguins. These are the smaller-sized penguins: Adelie, Chinstrap and Gentoo. Around the station we mostly run into Adelies because they are nesting nearby. However their numbers here are declining rapidly and it is likely that within the next 10 years Adelies will be extinct in the Palmer area. Scientists theorize this is happening because warming temperatures are decreasing the amount of sea ice that develops here. Less sea ice means less sea algae, which grows underneath the ice and is what krill eat. Krill is the Adelie's favorite food around the Antarctic Peninsula, so when there are fewer krill in an area the Adelies have less to eat and they either don't survive, or move to where krill is more plentiful. Right now they are moving further and further south, and penguins from the north who don't need the sea ice, the Gentoos and Chinstraps are moving in.

Gentoo penguin with chicks

A lone Chinstrap wandering around the Adelie colonies on Torgersen Island

Q: Did you see any Leopard Seals?

A: Yes, I see them all the time! I find them beautiful, powerful, and intriguing, but also really scary. There are many Leopard seals in our area and over the last week I have seen several of them each day. Just yesterday Oona and I were chased by one in our Zodiac. They look all innocent and smiley when they are asleep on an iceberg, but don't be fooled these guys are vicious. See those splotches on the ice behind this one? I'm pretty sure that's blood from the Leopard's latest snack, probably a penguin.

Napping Leopard Seal

Q: Was the first iceberg you saw solid, or melty?

A: It was solid, but definitely melting because it is summer down here and temperatures are often above freezing. Right now our temperatures here at Palmer Station hover around 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celcius), so we often get both rain and snow in the same day. Sometimes it's sunny though, and our last sunny day was in the 40s (Fahrenheit). Yippee! I got to wear only one pair of long underwear that day.

Here's the top of a very ornate iceberg we found yesterday aground next to Old Palmer Island

A Day in My Life at Palmer

2009-01-12T16:17:00.001-08:00

I have been busy working at Palmer Station. My life here is so full that it often seems like a week's worth of excitement, activity, fun and hardship is crammed into each day. My typical Antarctic work day in decent weather (meaning anywhere from blue bird sunshiny beautiful to pretty crappy, but not with really strong winds) goes something like this:

7:45 am - Wake up and attempt to climb down from the top bunk without hitting my head on the ceiling tiles or lighting fixture. Conduct a preliminary assessment of the weather. Pretty much all my work is done outside here so weather defines much of what I can do each day. First, listen for precipitation and high winds. Next, open the window shade just a little bit and look out. Check the flags that mark some conduit running over the rocks for wind speed. This is very important when trying to record, or if you want to go boating- we are only allowed out in the Zodiacs if it's blowing 20 knots or less. Here's a sample of what winds strong enough to keep us on land sound like). Finally, note how grey the sky is and if any distant peaks are visible.

The view out our bedroom window on a good weather day

7:50 am- Try to get dressed and wake up enough to make it downstairs to breakfast before it officially ends at 8 am. I believe I have successfully attended breakfast once or twice in the last two weeks.

8 am - Hmm, missed hot breakfast again. Eat yogurt and cereal (available anytime) instead. Oona and I work on gaining full consciousness via black tea and enjoy the empty galley, as most folks have already gone off to work. Sometimes the birders, who are studying the local avian populations, join us, as they also work late and start late.

9 am - Having formulated a plan for the day's adventures, usually involving boating to one of the nearby islands, Oona and I commence packing up our gear for the day. For me this generally includes: 2 field recorders (Sound Devices 702, Edirol R-09HR), my Sennheiser mics (MKH 30 and MKH 40 in a blimp windscreen with a furry coat named "Yeti"), a pair of hydrophones (Aquarian Audio H2-XLRs), two pairs of headphones, a video camera, a still camera, one or two tripods (I mount my mics on these as well as my cameras), and spare batteries, tapes, CF and SD cards. Since we are usually dealing with rain, snow and/or boating, everything gets packed inside drybags and a waterproof backpack. Now that's just my technical gear. I also need extra layers of clothing, sunscreen, food, and water. Plus, when traveling by Zodiac, we are required to carry an additional drybag containing a full change of clothes, in case we fall overboard or otherwise manage to get wet.

9:45 am - I am running back upstairs to my room in order to change into my Antarctic adventure outfit. This is comprised of: Gore-tex pants over 2 pairs of long underwear on the bottom, and 2 long underwear shirts, a windproof softshell, a thick fleece jacket, and a Gore-tex shell on top. Plus mountaineering boots and assorted socks, hats, and gloves.

9:55 am - Quick stop on the 2nd floor to look at the official weather. The day's forecast, current conditions, and graphs of weather trends and tides are displayed continously on several computer monitors. Weather is that important here. Next we write ourselves on the chalkboard, where all trips leaving the station are posted. We write down who is in our party, where we are headed, the time we are leaving, expected time of return, and our callsign. One of the fun rules here is that each time you go out you must come up with a new callsign.

10 am - Oona and I have managed to pile up all our things on the bench in the vestibule near the front door. It is time to don our Mustang jackets: the orange, insulated, buoyant coats that we must wear while boating. Having wrangled it on, I struggle to clip on the "beavertail." This is a rubber flap that hangs down from the back of the jacket, wraps up between your legs, and then is clipped into the front of the Mustang. It holds you in the jacket if someone is trying to haul you out of the water by your coat. Now I feel penguinesque- bulky and a bit awkward on land, but at least I won't sink in the Southern Ocean.

Here I am, driving our Zodiac in my Mustang jacket

10:15 - Having hauled all our bags to the rocks at the edge of the Zodiac parking lot, we pull in our Zodiac, warm the engine up, check the boat, load our gear, and then radio to the station that we are departing. Adventure ho!

Adventure time - Now we are bound for one of the islands within the Palmer Safe Boating Limits. Since the Antarctic summer is nesting season for penguins, petrels, and shags, many of the islands are closed right now to protect them. Still, the remaining islands which we are allowed to land on and explore have plenty of variety to keep us busy. For safety reasons, every time we land on an island or leave an island we radio in to the station to let them know.

Melting glacier on Old Palmer Island

Old Palmer Island is one of my favorite places here. It's the largest island we can visit and is home to many Elephant Seals, who seem to do a lot of napping, both near our tie-up point and on the north side of the island where the retreating glacier has revealed a beautiful cove (This cove has been dubbed "Jeff's Unnatural Obcession" after one of our staff. Apparently there is a story behind the name, but I haven't heard it yet). The Elephant Seals haul out and caterpillar their massive bodies uphill to slumber in the sun nestled in between little hillocks. The cove often echos with their wild groans, grunts, and hurrumphs. As Murphy would have it, the one day I was on Old Palmer in good weather the Elephant Seals were fast asleep, so all I could record was a lot of deep breathing, punctuated by occasional snorts and snores. Still that was pretty fascinating. I'll post a sample of it here in a day or two when I get a chance to edit my Elephant Seal recordings. Also coming soon- sounds from a Fur Seal that was resting on Old Palmer yesterday. It seems to be a good place to sleep! Other things I still want to record on Old Palmer include: brash ice in the cove, the melting glacial remnants on the island, and the skuas and gulls that hang out and bath in a large pond in the middle of the island.

Antarctic Fur Seal napping on Old Palmer

On Torgersen Island

The other main island we have visited several times is Torgersen Island, home to a number of Adelie Penguin colonies. I was just there today and what a noisy, stinky (all that pink stuff you see in the pictures, that's penguin poop), but fun place it is! Half of the island is closed to visitors and half is open, as part of a study to monitor if/how human visitors affect Adelie colonies. Word is so far they have not noticed any major impacts. Interesting.

I think the penguins have chosen a very musical island, because Torgersen is covered in dense, fractured, pitched rocks. The Adelies gather the smallest of these stones to build their nests, but even the larger pieces are surprisingly resonant. One of my new favorite sounds is the tinkly music of penguin feet as the Adelies amble back and forth between the ocean and their colonies. I was trying to record their little footsteps today. I'll let you know if any of the the recordings come out good. Here's an example of what the Adelie Penguin voices sound like in a colony.

Recording the penguins

Sometimes Oona and I just go out and cruise around in our Zodiac, checking out the icebergs and brash ice, and keeping our eyes open for seals (Leopard, Crabeater, Southern Elephant, or Antarctic Fur Seals are around Palmer) or whales (Humpback). Here's an underwater recording of the brash ice chunks in the ocean.

Brash Ice. Yes, we boat through this every day.

Antarctic Terns

Then there are days, or evenings, when I just wander out into "The Backyard" (the exposed rocky area behind the station) and look for things to record there. This is an underwater recording of brash ice and waves at the shore just behind Palmer.

5 pm - Time to return to the station, radio ourselves back in, erase our names from the chalkboard, change out of salty, stinky clothes and get ready to eat dinner at 5:30.

7 pm to about midnight- Download sounds, images, and video into the computer, and back them up. Recharge batteries for all my electronic equipment. Begin sorting through recordings and photos, though there's never enough time to get to them all or watch my video footage. Write emails and blogs and then clamber up into the top bunk and get ready to start it all again tomorrow.

Edge of the Marr Ice Piedmont

Getting Oriented in Antarctica

2009-01-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

Today is my fifth day here at Palmer Station and in some ways I feel I have now been here for a very long time. Time has been flying by impossibly fast, each day jam-packed with a dizzying array of new experiences, all of them intense. Up until today the weather has been pretty benevolent, but right now a storm is raging outside my window with winds gusting up to 50 mph. And only now, in the midst of this howling greyness, does it finally sink in that I am really here in Antarctica.

Oona and I arrived at Palmer on Sunday, still woozy from 4+ days on the Gould, and were immediately thrown into a plethora of orientations: station orientation, lab orientation (where our "studio" spaces are), kitchen orientation (there is amazing food here!), and even waste orientation (pretty much everything is packed up and removed from the continent, but first it must be sorted and prepared properly). Meanwhile, there is a festive mood in the station because, not only are there new folks joining the Palmer community, but there's also all the people from the ship to party with and there are "freshies" (fresh fruit and vegetables) again for the first time since the last resupply ship in October. Anyhow, there is a big party with the boat people and the station people, but Oona and I are too exhausted and busy getting set up to make it over to the bar.

The next day we start exploring our new world. I spend the morning making my first attempts at recording the brash ice that is floating in the ocean all around the station. I have rigged two underwater mics to hang down from an 8-foot boom pole which I try extending out from the shoreline. I am literally fishing for sounds, which I find endlessly amusing. I am sure I look ridiculous, but I really don't care because the ice sounds so darn interesting. I will post some samples next time for you to hear.

Oona and I haven't been cleared to go out in the Zodiacs yet, so we head out to "the Backyard," the rocky glacial moraine behind the station, and up onto a small part of the glacier that covers Anvers Island. The station GSAR (Glacier Search and Rescue) team has marked off an area on the glacier that is free of crevasses and safe to go hiking on. Here's Rebecca (Palmer Area Manager), Oona, and myself doing our imitation of a band photo up on the glacier.

Early Tuesday morning, the Gould left Palmer to commence a 3+ week science cruise down the Antarctic Peninsula as part of the LTER (Long Term Ecological Research Network) Project. Everyone gathered at the dock to see them off. Apparently there is a tradition here of jumping off the pier (yeah, that means swimming in the ocean!) to wish departing ships good luck. This time we only had one intrepid jumper, but he had a very enthusiastic audience, both on the ship and onshore.

Then it was time for Oona and myself to take our Boating 2 course. This class is required before anyone can check out a Zodiac and travel around to the nearby islands, which is what we will be doing pretty much daily to work on our projects. First, our boating Sensei, John Fonseca, taught us how to tie up a boat, throw a line to a person overboard and gave us an overview of the Palmer Safe Boating Area and the emergency safety caches that are on each island. Then, after lunch, Oona, Tawna and I got our hands-on training. We learned how to operate the motor, safely pilot a boat through brash ice, and land on an island. Next up: Antarctic boating self rescue. This was when we got to jump into the ocean in our bright orange Mustang survival suits (they are insulated, float, and are theoretically waterproof- mine leaked a little, but still kept me nice and toasty) and practice hauling each other back into the boat. When properly equipped, swimming in the Antarctic ocean is actually quite comfortable, and in the midst of all this a humpback whale surfaces nearby and a few little Adelie penguins whiz past us. Nice. Most Boating 2 students don't have to do self rescue, but since Oona and I will be boating on our own a lot they want us to know it. Tawna, as one of the birders, will be out on the sea everyday and traveling to more remote islands than the rest of us, so she needs to know it as well.

Since becoming Boating 2 certified, over the last few days I have made several short excursions out in the Zodiacs: to visit a few of the islands, and to whale watch, which seems to be the most popular recreation activity among the staff here at Palmer. Here are some photos:

View of the continent from DeLaca Island

Adelie Penguins on Torgersen Island

On a Zodiac near Old Palmer Island

Brash ice and the edge of the Marr Ice Piedmont, Anvers Island

Now that I'm getting the hang of how things work here at Palmer, it's time to start recording some sounds...

On the way to Palmer

2009-01-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

More stories later. Here are a few photos from our nighttime (1/3/09) to early morning (1/4/09) approach to Palmer Station.

Northern end of Brabant Island

Brabant Island. Yes, that's a rock pinnacle on the right

More of Brabant Island

My first Antarctic iceberg

Somewhere in the Gerlache Strait at about 2 am

Looking east across the Bismarck Strait from near Palmer, circa 6am

Mount William (1515m) on Anvers Island

Anvers Island

Life on the Laurence M. Gould

2009-01-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

I’ve been on the boat heading south for about 4 days now and we still have about 16 hours to go until we reach Palmer Station. We are now officially in Antarctica because sometime midday yesterday we entered the area covered by the Antarctic Conservation Treaty. This is very exciting, especially since we just passed Smith Island, one of the South Shetland Islands and the first land we’ve seen in about 3 days.

This afternoon our first few penguins appeared, darting alongside the ship, and two whales were spouting in the distance. Up until today the dark, cave-like lounge, with its comfy reclining chairs, widescreen TV, and abundance of eager Scrabble and Cribbage players was the place to be. Now that there is something to see besides the vast expanse of the Southern Ocean people are congregating on the bridge instead. Folks are armed with cameras and binoculars and eagerly await the next wildlife sighting. In fact I am probably missing something exciting right now! Here is a photo of the Cape Petrels that have been merrily circling the ship for the last few hours.

Let me fill you in on what life has been like so far on the ship...

Back in Punta Arenas we were scheduled to move into the boat Tuesday at 7pm, but were delayed because two giant cruise ships were monopolizing the pier. In the meantime those of us who would be sailing south together went out for dinner and then waited in the NSF/AGUNSA office. Here, conversation inevitably turned to the topic du jour- seasickness. We discussed who had and hadn’t gotten sick in the past, and debated the efficacy of the available remedies: Scopolamine- aka “the patch,” pressure point wrist-bands, and Dramamine. Old-timers spouted tales of terrifying Drake crossings where the seas were 60-feet high and folks were imprisoned in their bunks for days, afraid to leave lest they suffer major trauma. I also learned that you should never put on more than one patch at a time because this could cause you to go temporarily insane. Apparently one woman who put on multiple patches decided to run around the ship naked eating people’s dirty socks- or so they say. It’s hard to know which of these stories are true and which we were told simply because we were such an eager and gullible audience. Anyhow, eventually the behemoth cruise ships left, the Gould pulled in and docked, and at around 1AM we were given the go ahead to board the ship. Having not had a decent night’s sleep in about 5 days, I went straight to bed in my cozy little top bunk in cabin 203.

Wednesday morning, I awoke just in time for lunch in the ship’s mess hall. Actually I haven’t made it to breakfast any of these days on board the ship, which is too bad, because I am told it is the best meal of the day here. At lunch we are informed that port operations have been shut down due to high winds (making it dangerous to load and unload cargo with cranes). People speculate on whether or not our departure will be delayed, and there is, of course, more talk of seasickness. I am still not sure what I should do about it. I have never been seasick before, but I’ve also never traveled on a boat for this long, and I’ve never crossed the Drake Passage (reputed to be the roughest seas in the world). The patch's side effects are nasty: dry mouth, drowsiness, and blurred vision. On the other hand, vomiting for 3-4 days straight sounds doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun either. At this point I am still hopeful I will be able to survive the crossing au natural.

The Gould was not supposed to depart until midnight, so it could catch the ebbing tide, thus we had one more day to wander around Punta Arenas. But first, there was a ship orientation and security meeting. We (the passengers) all gather in the lounge. Jaimee, our MPC (Marine Projects Coordinator) and Rick, the first mate, explain the rules of the boat. Some of these are: don’t enter restricted areas without permission, if you see anything dangerous call the bridge immediately, and, perhaps most importantly, don’t stop up the toilets (this can cause catastrophic failure of the ship’s entire sewage system)! We learn how to don a survival suit and life jacket, where our muster stations are, the emergency alarm signals, and what to do in case of a fire, man overboard, or the command to abandon ship. Next we head upstairs for a look at the life rafts (there are 6) and lifeboats (two). We practice climbing into one of the lifeboats and learn that they are designed to be self-righting. Yep, that means they are expecting that the lifeboat will be doing 360s in the waves.

That evening at shortly before 9pm I take my last few dockside photos and walk across the gangplank, bound for Antarctica. By midnight we are underway, heading out the Straight of Magellan. Sometime Thursday in the early morning, still snuggled in my bunk I notice the seas become a bit rougher. We have reached the open Pacific Ocean and are now headed down the eastern side of Tierra del Fuego towards Cape Horn. So far the waves are still pretty mellow and I’m doing OK with no seasickness remedies. Tawna (a penguin researcher and my roommate on the ship) and I manage to get out of bed in time for lunch again, and then there is a practice fire drill. As instructed, we all gather at our muster station holding our survival suits and lifejackets. A few passengers are already looking kind of green. Then Jaimee gives us the weather forecast: winds are supposed to rise and 45-foot swells are predicted in the Drake. That is when I decided that I should just use the patch.

The rest of Thursday was uneventful. I spent some time outside on the decks in the stern, watching a lone Royal Albatross gliding back and forth across our wake and trying to take a decent photograph of it. This I failed pretty miserably at. It seems that a more thorough knowledge of my camera's manual functions was required, but my Scopolamine haze was not conducive to learning new technical skills. Sorry. You'll just have to imagine a giant graceful bird skimming the water.

Fortunately the predicted storm never developed. However, large portions of Friday were like living in a rollercoaster. Just making it down to the mess hall and back was a pretty complete workout and at times I thought I should probably be wearing a helmet while attempting to go up and down the ship's staircases. Thankfully today is calmer and people we havn't seen in a few days are appearing at meals again. This bodes well, and tomorrow we will be at Palmer Station.

Punta Arenas, Chile

2008-12-30T07:21:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Punta Arenas, Chile. After three plane flights both myself and my luggage have made it here intact, though it was looking a bit dicey for a while there. It was critical that I make it to South America in a timely fashion because if I missed the boat to Palmer Station I would have to wait a month for the next one! I'm sure it would be fun to have a Patagonian adventure, but I do really want to go to Antarctica.

My first flight, to Dallas, Texas was delayed by more than two hours and it landed 14 minutes after my plane to Santiago was supposed to depart. Fortunately there were so many delayed flights with passengers that needed to catch the Santiago one that they held the plane for us AND our luggage. So, after a mad sprint across the Dallas terminal laden with 40-pounds of carry-on bags bulging with expensive and delicate recording equipment, I made it onto the plane, lungs burning but much relieved.

What followed has to be the coldest airplane ride I have ever endured, and unfortunately it was over 9 hours long. All night, by the window in the drafty exit row, I huddled under two fleece jackets and my scanty airplane blanket, attempting to find a way to get into the fetal position in my coach-sized seat. The experience reminded me of spending an unplanned night on the side of a mountain wrapped in a space blanket (which I must admit I have done a few times). At one point I looked up at the video monitor that was tracking our plane’s progress on a map of South America and it said that the temperature outside was a balmy -39 degrees Celsius.

In Santiago, thankfully, being the Southern Hemisphere, it was suddenly summer and quite a bit warmer. Myself and the other USAP (that's United States Antarctic Program) folk gathered in the baggage claim area and slowly met each other as we collected our bags. Our luggage all sported the USAP’s signature ice-blue, penguin-motif name tags so it wasn’t too difficult to identify who was with our group. We were met by an AGUNSA agent named Jimmy who helped us make our way through Chilean immigration and onto our next flight, to Punta Arenas. Jimmy has been wrangling USAP travelers through the Santiago airport for 25 years and I have to say he was really good at managing our lengthy caravan of luggage carts and bleary-eyed Antarctic scientists, artists, and staff. Our last flight arrived in Punta Arenas in the evening and we were shuttled to our hotels. Finally, after over 30 hours of travel, a chance to be horizonal, brush my teeth and change my clothes! Very exciting!

Today we will get our ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) clothing and then board the ship in the evening. Hopefully tomorrow we will be on our way to Antarctica, but right now the winds are blowing incredibly strong and operations at the port are temporarily shut down. We'll see.

Here's what the beach looks like here. Look at all the white caps!

Heading South

2008-12-27T14:42:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm trying to anyway. At the moment, due to flight delays, I am just waiting at my gate in the San Francisco airport. This means I haven't even left my hometown yet, but hopefully soon I will be en route to Antarctica.

It takes about a week to get from California all the way down to Palmer Station. First I have two days of flying (possibly more with weather delays). From San Francisco I fly to Dallas, then from Dallas there's an overnight flight to Santiago, Chile, and then from there we fly to Punta Arenas, Chile. In Punta Arenas I will check out Extreme Cold Weather Clothing. This is the super-spiffy polar-specific clothing that the NSF loans us to use while on the Ice, including the signature big red parka that you see everyone wearing in photos from Antarctica. Then I will board a research icebreaker ship, the Laurence M. Gould, and sail south for about four days to the Antarctic Peninsula and Anvers Island, where Palmer is located.

Oh, we are getting ready to board now...

How to play natural objects as instruments

2008-12-16T08:38:00.001-08:00

When people learn that I am a musician inevitably their first question is "What kind of music do you play?" I'm never quite sure how to answer this because when I say that I make experimental music using amplified natural objects as instruments most people have no idea what I am talking about. So, in case you also have doubts about my sanity, here is a little background on how one can make music with things like rocks, water, feathers, bones and so forth, which is a big part of what I will soon be doing down in Antarctica.

There are many ways in which you can get items from the natural world to produce interesting sounds. Solid objects like wood, stone, leaves, feathers and bones may be bowed, brushed, rubbed, tapped, blown through, or set into motion in various ways. Materials such as water and sand can be dripped, drained, stirred, sifted, poured and filtered. These playing methods produce a great spectrum of sounds, from clear, pitched tones to gritty, textural noises, and each specific object or material contains its own unique voices. One of my favorite sounds, used in my work Ziran, are the muted flurries of delicate melodies made when flower petals are dropped on an amplified pinecone. Other sounds I am particularly fond of include the changing rhythmic patterns of wobbling rocks, and swooping sounds made by bowing dried leaves while changing their proximity to a microphone. You can hear some mp3 excerpts from my past compositions with natural-objects here.

One of the most exciting parts of working with these unusual instruments is the time I spend impersonating a mad scientist. My search for music hidden within objects and materials from nature includes a lot of sound-making experiments. Sometimes I start out with a hypothesis (I think that if I bow this boa constrictor rib bone it will make howling wind sounds) and sometimes I don't (This is when I just try random crazy things, and I have found some of my best sounds this way). Often my experiments fail - meaning I discover nothing new, or yet another irritating sound (it's surprisingly easy to find sounds that resemble fingernails scratching on a chalkboard). Every so often I have what my father, an engineer and inventor, calls a eureka moment. For me this is when a fascinating new, and often unexpected, voice jumps out of a leaf or stone or whatever I am playing with that day.

Like many scientific explorers I use tools and techniques that have only recently become available in order to gain access to previously unvisited realms. Because many of the sounds that natural objects make are very quiet I use microphones and amplification to enable me to hear them, record them, and to play them live on stage. In Antarctica I will be using contact mics, condenser mics and hydrophones. I will write more about the specifics of my Antarctic field recording equipment in a future post (specialized gear is needed to record in the Antarctic Peninsula's cold, wet, and windy climate- mostly the kind of audio equipment used in location film shoots and nature field recording). I love exploring the micro-aural worlds that these tools reveal within a rock, pinecone, leaf, or bucketful of water, playing with the phenomena I find there, and building musical compositions out of these sounds. Aside from amplification I use no other other electronic effects in my natural-object music. It's not that I don't like reverb, flanging, delays, distortion and so forth, I simply don't need them to make this music. The sounds I find in these instruments are already so unusual and rich.

Once I find a collection of sounds that fascinate me it's time to start creating an actual composition. After all, just having a set of novel sounds does not equal music, it's what you do with them that makes them musical or not: all the details of how you play the instruments and how the sounds are put together. When I am composing I sculpt my sounds into musical forms that reflect, model, or demonstrate the theme of the piece. This may include the manner in which objects are played, organizational structures, which instruments or sounds are used in the piece (or building new instruments for it) and/or overall mode of creation. For example, my piece Umi from Music for Rocks and Water which was inspired by waves, swells and surf in the ocean, is constructed from wave-shaped musical gestures (on both macro and micro scales), the physical motions performers use when they play the piece are circular and sinusoidal, the sounds that comprise the piece resemble ocean surf, and the instruments are literally rocks and sand from a beach. You can hear an excerpt from Umi here.

I actually score out most of my compositions so that my ensemble and I can learn them and then perform the pieces live in front of an audience. I have developed my own system of notation to articulate how to play things like rocks, water and pinecones. It's a combination of graphics and text instructions, sometimes with sections of traditional music notation mixed in. Here is a little excerpt from the score to Umi.

I should mention that all my natural-object instruments get names. I'm actually not usually that into naming things (for example, none of my cars have ever had names!) but when you start having a studio full of rocks and pinecones it becomes necessary to call them something just to help tell them apart. Then, also in scores I can specify exactly which thing to play when. So, above, the Cairn is a stack of three smooth granite stones, and the top one is named Lil' Wobbler because it is small, egg-shaped and wobbles. I admit most of my names are not that exciting, merely functional (that's probably because, as stated above, I'm not really the naming type). In the past there has been some confusion as several different stones all got dubbed "Grey Rock" and then I didn't know which one was the right Grey Rock for which piece. Thankfully the other players in my ensemble, currently A.L. Dentel and Karen Stackpole, are helping with the naming duties these days.

About the project

2008-12-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

Finally, after over a decade of dreaming and two years of research, grant-writing, logistics and planning, I am going to Antarctica in about 3 weeks. Here's what I will be doing there...

I have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program to make music on the Antarctic Peninsula. My project is to create a series of compositions based on the forces that shape environments and ecosystems in Antarctica, using only sounds from the natural world. While in Antarctica, I will play amplified natural materials such as ice, rock, water, moss, feathers, shells and bones as musical instruments. I will record compositional elements and improvisations created with these instruments, collect field recordings on the peninsula's islands and in the surrounding seas, and gather a few Antarctic natural objects that I will bring back with me to the United States to use later as instruments in live performances.

Each composition will have a unique subject matter and instrumentation. The musical structures, sound sources, and development process of each piece will reflect that work’s specific subject. Individual compositions will explore: sea and land ice, the Antarctic circumpolar current, wind and storm patterns, geological and paleontological histories, human exploration and exploitation, adaptations of life to environmental extremes, and changing terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Themes will focus on topics under current scientific investigation in the region, and highlight connections between the Antarctic Peninsula and global climate change.

Upon returning to the U.S. in February I will craft a final set of compositions from materials gathered in Antarctica. The project will culminate in a DVD release, and a series of live performances and educational presentations in late 2009.