Betsey Biggs

For eighteen musicians with networked laptops, microphones and speakers, arctic ice sounds, humming, and custom software. Commissioned by the Peabody Institute Laptop Ensemble. 10 minutes.

Sing Broken Ice (For Pauline) is a networked electronic music composition for eighteen musicians. It explores the crackles, sighs, shifts of arctic ice melting, and transforms these sounds through sonic meditations of the performers and sea ice data from the Arctic Ocean until the melting ice has become completely submerged in a sea of drone and glitch.

Players close their eyes and slowly listen to the sounds of arctic ice melting. The crackles, sighs, shifts. Become aware of their own crackles, sighs, shifts, melting, of the pitches they can hear, the pitches they are imagining. Slowly they vocalize their breathing — hum, sing, sigh, shriek, melt and break as the ice is melting and breaking. These vocalizations are analyzed, and their corresponding MIDI pitches sent to the conductor’s computer. These pitches, together, form a pool of possible frequencies to be sent back out to the players’ laptops and mapped onto resonant filters applied to each player’s arctic ice melt audio.

Over the course of the piece, the likelihood and intensity of these resonant frequencies interrupting the natural sounds of the melting ice, as well as the intensity of the reverb and glitch audio effects applied to them, is controlled by monthly sea ice data from the past twenty years. The more ice has melted in a particular month, the more intense the resonant frequency interruptions will be. The piece ends when the melting ice has become submerged in a sea of drone and glitch and the conductor fades all sounds out.

This work is dedicated to my teacher, Pauline Oliveros. Peabody’s commission came as I was composing MELT: The Memory of Ice, and I was imagining all of the other ways we could listen to and feel (not think) about the melting arctic ice and climate change more generally.

CREDITS

composer: Betsey Biggs
performer: Peabody Institute Laptop Ensemble

GRANTS, AWARDS, COMMISSIONS

Commission ($250) from Peabody Laptop Ensemble, Johns Hopkins University

PERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITIONS

2024: Joe Byrd Hall at the Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.