Glacial by Paul Walde

In 2019 Paul Walde visited the Colman Glacier at Qwú’mə Kwəlshéːn (Mount Baker, Washington) with a small team to record the sights and sounds at the glacier. The resulting artwork, which was 3 years in the making, is an almost five-hour immersive sound and video installation in which the sounds of the glacier melting are modified using musical instruments as speakers accompanied by a detailed video portrait of the glacial environment. Using a violin, viola, cello, double bass, timpani, and cymbal fitted with sonic transducers, through a process of recording and re-recording, naturalistic field recordings are transformed into the resonant frequencies of the instruments which form the basis of this sound composition. The scale and materials of the instruments act as acoustic signal processors and, in the installation, the smaller string instruments are mounted to the gallery walls while the larger instruments occupy the floor space. Central to the installation is a large-scale animated video projection, generated from a massive composite photograph, that leads the viewer through a tour of the glacier in slow motion from distant vistas to extreme details. For this recording, the audio feed to each of the instruments was recorded separately in the studio and recombined in a virtual 3D space to best emulate the installation in both stereo and multichannel formats.

Paul Walde is an award-winning artist and composer who lives in Victoria, Canada on lək̓ʷəŋən territory. Walde’s music and sound compositions have been a prominent feature in his artwork for over 20 years. He is best known for his interdisciplinary performance works staged in the natural environment which are often used as the basis of his widely exhibited sound and video installations.

paulwalde.com