The music of On Sonorous Seas was made almost entirely from hydrophone recordings collected by the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust and Mhairi Killin during a ten day research voyage in the Hebrides during NATO Joint Warrior Military Exercise, along with some additional recordings from other HWDT voyages.

The piece is not intended to accurately represent the sonic environments that are inhabited by cetaceans, rather I moulded these recordings into imagined sonic spaces for a listener to place themselves, an imagined space experienced solely through sound and listening.

I say “imagined” as the experience of cetaceans is so separated from our own. It is tempting to romanticise the existence of whales, as animals that have long carried the weight of majesticness and mysticism due to their size and elusiveness. It is tempting to project anthropomorphic characteristics onto them and relate our experiences to theirs with a desire to connect “us” and “them” (though having said this, it is important to acknowledge the importance of whales in the cultures of various first nations communities such as the Makah people on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America, relationships that are complex and deep rooted).

The sound environments I have made are imagined because they need to be. The void between our experiences and theirs is demonstrated by us requiring technology to catch a mere glimpse of their world yet this glimpse is hazy, clouded by the rush of water, boat engines and snapping shrimp. The distance is too great for me to recreate an accurate representation of their world so instead one must embrace the distance and create something imagined. For this reason, the sounds of cetaceans in this piece are not always obvious, sometimes they are hidden with only brief fragments audible amongst the static and engine noise. At points I present the sounds as they were found, other times they are elusive or noticeably absent.

Throughout the piece, I make use of organ and accordion “like” sounds. I was drawn to these as instruments in that they require air or breath, a small reference to a significant characteristic of cetaceans. Organs also carry connotations of religiosity, reverence, and requiem. In reality, the presence of these instruments in the piece is also imagined. They are entirely synthesised from the cetacean recordings using granular processes, it was merely by chance that these audio processes evoked these instruments.

The vocal samples were provided by Lea Shaw. They were improvised in response to early iterations of the piece and were then heavily processed. Like the organs, I was drawn to the connotations of breath and air, a fleetingly distant evolutionary link that we share, as well as the lamenting qualities of a wordless human voice.