Glacial Hauntings and Seismic Signals: A Practice in
Quantum Listening

Tyler Rai

Death Rattle (Audio):

Glacial Hauntings and Seismic Signals: A Practice in
Quantum Listening

For the last year, I have been listening to the sounds of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Specifically, I have been listening to recordings of ice calving events – moments when large masses of ice break away from the glacier. Thwaites is a significant subject to be listening to. As the widest glacier on Earth, the changes that Thwaites undergoes in response to climate change will impact the stability of the entire ice sheet and neighboring glaciers. The future of Thwaites is intimately tied to the future of Earth’s coastlines and the communities and cultures present there. In listening to these moments of rupture from the ice, I am listening  to both discrete events as well as an accumulation of changing conditions.

 

The sound files in my computer are labeled with dates years apart, but I listen to them all at once. I listen to geologic time as a cacophony of breaks, a chorus of departures from one version of a world into another. It is a story told through changes in frequency. Each record of a calving event has a unique signature – a particular shape to the sound file, a distinct lead-up to the crescendo of the break. The files themselves become a kind of scripture, a dialect I try to learn how to understand.

 

When I listen to the sound of ice falling into the sea, I hear Other sounds. Moans and cries emerge from my computer – the popping of microphones, the ringing of bells. I imagine monsters. I listen to glacial ghosts in-the-making.

 

As a listener informed by dance and performance practices, I am trained to listen to many scales and proximities simultaneously. Listening to my own breath while tracking the movements and changes of an ensemble. American composer and pioneer of experimental music, Pauline Oliveros, defines this practice as “quantum listening.” She writes that in quantum listening, we  practice listening to more than one reality simultaneously in as many ways as possible.

 

“What is heard is changed by listening and changes the listener.”

 

My human listening is always approximate – a sensing built on variations of past experience and reference points. How can my body listen to what it has no reference for? Can my listening become atomic as I listen to the breaks?

 

When my grandfather was dying, I had no reference for the sounds that came out of his body. I was a child and felt the strangeness of witnessing someone who was once familiar undergo transformations that were foreign to my own understanding. The sounds that arose out of his body still haunt me in their inexplicability. I did not know how to recognize the stages of dying he was passing through. I had yet to learn about the death rattle – a sound which occurs once fluid enters into the lungs. It is a sound that cues a changing state; serves as a signal between one world and another.

 

Touch and hearing are the last senses to leave us when we die. To listen deeply to the world is to be touched by it and to make oneself vulnerable to being changed as a result. The significance of these sensory abilities at the end of life is foregrounded as we pass through one version of a world into another.

 

As glaciers melt and the world changes, listening becomes the portal through which stories of the cryosphere come through and become the first sentences of a new story of the world. I listen to the sounds coming from the body of Thwaits as I would an elder. I listen closely, knowing that each utterance arrives from lifetimes before my own. I open myself to each phrase, and I am changed.

 

https://glacialhauntologies.com/