The International Pond Conference was held online during 12-13 November 2024 and my abstract, “Sonic Pond Dipping: Underwater Soundscapes”, was selected as an oral presentation. The full abstract can be read below. This was another chance to bring the arts into what is typically a science-heavy arena.
This piece would be a continuation of the ‘audio-poster’ concept, an original idea I premiered at the 9th EPCN conference in 2021. It uses the science-conference phenomenon of ‘poster presentations’, wherein new research is distilled onto a single, large poster format, but turns it into an AV experience. My intention is make research multi-sensory, and thus more accessible, whilst directly advocating sound as my primary medium.
It was announced that all presentations should be pre-recorded. Personally, I find online meetings impersonal enough without the additional separation introduced by a pre-recorded presentation. Often the presenter isn’t even, well, present! But the requirement to pre-record did offer the chance to get creative.
I produced a new video which introduces the concept giving a voice to nature through the practice of Sonic Pond Dipping. It incorporates B-roll footage from a video shoot from the UKRI’s ‘101 Jobs: Switching Sectors’ campaign [watch the video here] alongside underwater videos made during workshops. Rather than pre-record a standard oral presentation, I provide a voiceover.
As I say at the beginning of the video, the aim was to give much of my allocated ten minute slot over to “the most important delegate of all: the pond. Rather than talk for, or about them, this video offers them a chance to talk for themselves”. It is a deliberate attempt to personify the pond and change our relationship to these small waterbodies. After a short introduction, the bulk of the video is handed over to hydrophone recordings with accompanying underwater camera footage. This is protected time, allowing nature to speak for itself. Ponds are not made of water1 – there are many more interactions happening between the landscape, the aquatic inhabitants, the bacteria, the terrestrial species; and also their sonic fingerprint. Much as people talk about boreal forests of the northern hemisphere, or howling desert dunes, or windswept arctic tundra, ponds have their own sonic identity.
The idea of underwater filming came from early attempts to identify the strange and bewildering array of sounds out of sight but increasingly I find video creation becoming a part of my creative process. It further blurs the line between whether this practice is purely creativity-driven or a form of documentation. In any case, it aims to bridge arts-science communication gap.
Once again, I was surprised by the number of questions, especially as I was in the first session of the day. I usually expect to be on later, and hope that the unusual approach will be a pleasant break from the heavy dose of dialogue, data, and graphs. As has come to be expected, many enquire as to what is making the sound and to what extent the sounds have been processed, but increasingly people comment on the relaxing and meditative quality of the sounds and whether they might be used therapeutically. Blue spaces have much still to offer.
The International Pond Conference was organised by Ponderful and EPCN.
- Nicolson, A. (2021). The Sea is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides. Collins Press. ↩︎