A contemporary underwater music composer Michel Redolfi, said that: “Music in the water fills the void of the silence. Sound means life and when music is broadcast underwater, it’s a playful life sign. In addition, your sensory system is boosted by the bone conduction listening, which is very energetic and soothing at the same time. Music in the water opens the body and mind.“ [Redolfi]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99kAO-SCxOI&ab_channel=MichelRedolfi
Joel Cahen is the UK-based sound and visual designer who founded the traveling “deep listening” event Wet Sounds. Wet Sounds transforms swimming pools into spaces for music, light and performance experienced by entering the water and moving freely below and above the water surface. In 2008, Joel Cahen introduced a selection of immersive underwater sounds from all around the world for the first performances of Wet Sounds.
“Wet Sounds pieces are archived online. A few are hydrophonic recordings—so that the fact that they were played back under water raises the question of whether these are compound or redundant underwater pieces (and what happens when we listen in air?). “ – anthropologist Stefan Helmreich poses this question in his article “Underwater music: tuning composition to the sounds of science”.
A pioneer of underwater sound experimentation was John Cage, which approach as mixing subjective and scientific methods.
“in his collaboration with Lou Harrison, Double Music (1941), in which Cage specified the use of a “water gong (small—12”–16” diameter—Chinese gong raised or lowered into tub of water during production of tone).” Cage traces his use of the water gong to 1937 at UCLA, where, acting as an accompanist, he sought a solution to the problem of providing musical cues to water ballet swimmers when their heads were under water. (Kahn 1999, 249–50; see also Hines 1994, 90) “
The next one was a Sound installation artist – Max Neuhaus:
“In Water Whistle [1971–1974], water was forced through whistles under water to produce pitched sounds that could be heard by the audience only when they submerged themselves. In Underwater Music [1976–1978], he modified this technique by using specially designed underwater loudspeakers and electronically generated sounds, which were composed through a combination of scientific experiment and intuitive, creative decisions.” (Miller 2002, 26)
Sources:
1. Stefan Helmreich – Underwater music: tuning composition to the sounds of science
2. Stefan Helmreich – An anthropologist underwater: Immersive soundscapes, submarine cyborgs, and transductive ethnography
3. Sonja Roth – An exploration of water in Sound Art
