Humpback Whale

JA: What led you to this project? What began this interest in whale song, especially in terms of humans articulating it?

MR: I had been working with whales for quite a few years before the Whale Voice Choir, and all my work is about our perception of what we call Nature and our relationship with more-than-human animals.

There was a point in my life, when I was working in a whale museum in Iceland, and I was also a whale-watching guide. By then I had already started looking into our relationship with whales. First, I was working with the bones— working in a museum with collections, I could easily access whale bones for my practice.

Then, through whale-watching work and studying the impact of noise pollution on whales, I started to develop the idea of the Whale Voice Choir. The intention was to try to sensitise people to the impacts of noise pollution in the sea.

I had discussions with different scientists on the topic and then was playfully thinking, “Oh, would you try and sing like a whale?” Just having fun with the idea, and it all fell into place. It’s all about the exploration of becoming animal, trying to get people to really think about being in the sea as a different environment than we are used to, heavily relying on sound as whales and many marine animals do, instead of other senses.

JA: That’s really interesting. You have touched on this already, but more directly what is your intention behind the Whale Voice Choir?

MR: It’s about getting people to think about what it’s like to be more-than-human and to have different sensibilities to our environment. Hopefully, that will lead people to question how we impact the environment.

Marine plastic pollution has become very mediatised: people really know about this topic; it’s very visible. You go walk on the coastline, and you can see it. On the other hand, marine noise pollution, people don’t really hear much about, and it is not something that is directly visible. It’s not mediatised as much, but there is a lot of noise pollution created by us.

Noise pollution is created through shipping industry. Motorized vessels create a lot of noise pollution as does oil and gas exploration. Seismic guns create really, really incredibly loud blasts. Also, there is noise from pile driving to build bridges, harbours, and offshore structures. Military sonars, as well, are damaging to cetaceans.

The impact of noise pollution on Beaked Whales, in particular, has been documented. They are deep divers, which means they go very deep in the sea to feed. As mammals, like us, they need to breathe the air to get oxygen. When there is a loud noise, their survival instinct tells them to get away from it and they panic and swim too fast towards the surface to get away from the noise, to breathe. Like us, they get decompression sickness; that is how many of them have died.

It’s not really talked about that much. There is a documentary called Sonic Sea that explores this problem, but it’s still not on the public radar, so I wanted to touch on this issue.

JA: There’s something that comes up for me when you were speaking about awareness through trying to be, imagining, or imagining oneself as an other-animal, which is the big question of human limitations—limitations of human physiology but also limitations of our ability to comprehend creatures, which are at once so similar and so alien.

MR: Cetaceans are charismatic megafauna, and people want to engage with them. It’s easier to get people to talk about whales than plankton although plankton is affected by noise pollution, too.

I chose the Humpback Whale specifically as, since Roger Payne published recorded songs of the Humpback Whales in the 1970s, they have become the stars of the whale family because of their intriguing songs.

What’s amazing about whales is that they are both like us and unlike us. They are mammals like us: they evolved on land originally; then, they evolved back to the sea. I love their evolution; it’s this crazy, crazy history. And so, as mammals they had to adapt to being back in the sea. They still breathe air, like us. They feed milk to their young. And they have the same phalanges. If you’ve seen the bones in the flippers, they are just like our bones.

There are so many things we can identify with, and yet they live in this environment that’s completely alien to us. We can’t live in water. To me, they’re the link between us and the sea. That’s how I see them. Because they have evolved to live in the sea, there’s obviously some differences and limitations. When I was doing these workshops with people, I would start with some basic information about how whales rely on sound to navigate their environment; then, I would get them to try and do it themselves.

I asked people to close their eyes and imagine they’re in the sea, to imagine they’re relying completely on sound. I also asked people to hold their nose. While humans exhale when we speak, whales are capable of recycling air as they have evolved a small internal air sack. I tried to get people to hold their breath and recycle air, which humans can do, but not for very long. At the same time, participants would try to make noise in their throats while recycling. Obviously, this is very restrictive as we’re not used to it. Some people hated this, but others continued this exploration even when they were told they could go into improvisation and be free to use any technique. And actually the performers found they could make new noises they never knew they could make.

The difference between human/whale limitations was the base of the performance. It is really trying to imagine you’re not in your human body anymore. You’re in an environment where you only rely on sound and you can’t breathe.

JA: And in terms of that, then, are you asking the participants to try to mimic whale song, or are you more trying to get them to embody the space and then allow for human sounds to come from that?

MR: The first version, Whale Voice Choir I, was about people just doing their own interpretation. For the second version, which is presented here, Whale Voice Choir II, I collaborated with an Icelandic composer, Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson. Guðmundur manipulated recorded songs of Humpback Whales and composed a musical score. The participants in this choir listened to the recording through earphones and were instructed to reproduce exactly what they were hearing.

So that’s pushing the performer further to be more whale—pushing the body even further. They all have their eyes closed, and more than half of them are holding their breath. They were trying so hard to become whale, and the sounds they produced were really quite amazing.

JA: As part of the Feral Collective section, I wonder in what sense you see this as a collaboration or a feral collective.

MR: I’m not sure how much I would use the word collaboration since the whale is not aware of collaborating, but definitely as a collective in a sense that we are involved in the sea community whether we want it or not.

And we need to be more aware that we are part of it. We are impacting it. This project is a way for me to explore another avenue of being part of this community. Let’s learn ways to be like the other members of this community.

There’s a rich history of humans trying to communicate with cetaceans, and that’s a whole other subject, but it’s fascinating. I wouldn’t say they were all very collaborative. They were more like humans trying to impose language on dolphins, but there’s some amazing work now of humans trying to understand. Scientists are going out there and trying to communicate, respecting the dolphins’ agency. There is this amazing scientist, Denise Herzing, who’s doing just that, she’s been going out in the wild and trying to create the same whistles that the dolphins are making through machines to communicate with them instead of her imposing her language in a constrained setting. This ethical evolution of trying to communicate with cetaceans also informed my project.

JA: I think it’s really intriguing that you say it’s not a collaboration because actually I raise questions when multispecies collaborations are presented. Where is the more-than-human agency? Who is it for? Has there been a form of consent? You propose an idea of collectivity. Whether humans like it or not, whether we intend it or not, we are part of the sea and ocean community. Perhaps this piece is really pointing towards this deep entanglement with bodies, which at first feel so alien and so far from our own.

MR: Absolutely. We are not only connected through our shared mammal anatomy, but it also goes beyond that. Marine animals are very, very sensitive to sound, and for many cetaceans, it’s a whole culture. It’s just amazing to explore because we think we’re the only ones, but when you look at other species, many of them use sounds in varied and intelligent ways.

JA: How do you feel like this project relates to the project of becoming-feral?

MR: We’re in an age where we have succeeded in many ways to live separately from wilderness. We need to learn to become wild again. And in this project, we’re exploring the first steps of rewilding; we’re becoming a bit more feral, trying to learn and feel what it might be like to be a wild species. Exploring sounds as other animals do is a kind of reaching out to other species to build a bridge from our detached state to the wild community.