WINNER OF A 2019 CANADIAN ARCHITECT STUDENT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE
Josh Wallace, Carleton University

Advisor: Catherine Bonier
Field research for the project included recording the sounds of a glacier
Climate change is often seen as an abstract phenomenon that occasionally manifests in fragments of local weather. But could it also become a cultural object" How could the medium of sound allow climate change to be woven into human imagination and memory"
This thesis explores these questions by blurring the lines between human-made music and environmentally produced sound. The research phase included recording the sounds produced by the shifting Athabasca Glacier, and visually cataloguing these recordings alongside human music. Human-produced music is often tonal and rhythmic, with consistent boundaries and divisions. Environmentally produced sound is often atonal and arhythmic, with an enormous range and granularity of frequencies and frequency relationships. Polar spectrograms show the differences between human-produced music and sounds from the natural world.
The author then turned to designing a series of environmentally activated instruments to allow participants to interface with the climate. A Glacier Accordion, anchored to the shifting ground of the Athabasca Glacier, is ?played? by the movement of wind through a series of membranes. The instrument is operated both by humans, who can tune the membranes by adjusting cranks and pulley, and by the glacier, whose ...