The Thames is a noisy river, but it’s been difficult to listen to the sound of the watery landscape below the waves until now. An exhibition at the Natural History Museum allows you to hear the water world inhabited by so many varied animals.
The sound installation, The River, is by Norwegian sound artist Jana Winderen in collaboration with spatial audio expert Tony Myatt and explores the sound world below the surface of the River Thames using underwater audio recordings in a first-of-its-kind exhibition for the Museum.
The two artists worked their way along the river from source to estuary and then turned the recordings into a loop that plays inside one of the museum galleries. In a dimly lit room, you can lay back and listen to the river.
Linger long enough and you can hear how the rive noise changes as the artists work their way along it, from the din of chatter in the rural areas to the roar of boats passing overhead in the centre of London. And yes, thanks to the sound effects in the room, the boats really do pass overhead.
It’s a curious experience because the sounds are played in a way that we humans can perceive, even though the animals will perceive them in a very different way. And thanks to the watery world, sounds travel so much further than they do in the air. Sounds recorded in the river in one place could well be coming from miles away, which rather breaks how we think of sound, as animals are more concerned about proximity to prey than how loud they are.
The impact of mankind on the water world is very noticeable, with the boats roaring regularly and trains rumbling past at times. One sound you won’t hear, though, is Big Ben. Although there was a hydrophone in the river next to Parliament, the sound we humans are so familiar with is unknown to animals in the river.
Just as we humans on the land are generally unaware of the noise of the river.
The work has been composed specifically for the Natural History Museum and is free to visit until the end of January 2025.
This article was published on ianVisits
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