Frozen Music

Andrew McGibbon explores the sounds and music of the ice, meeting the composers, musicians and indigenous artists in the Arctic region who use the ice to make music. He discovers the natural and haunting sounds made by the movements of deep frozen ice, ice melting and icebergs calving and colliding.

Terje Isungset is a drummer and ice music composer from Norway who makes his own instruments each winter and performs at festivals across the Arctic region. His beautiful sounds mingle with voices and even a string section providing a fitting and atmospheric backdrop to his environment.

Faithfully capturing the sounds of ice and making them sound art is the work of Jana Winderen who uses a range of sophisticated hydrophones across the melting and freezing seasons. Andreas Bick creates collages of ice sounds recorded all across the Arctic, from iceberg calving to resonating ice sheets on a lake.

Arild Sundfjord is an Oceanographer who explains why Arctic sea ice matters.

This is the third of three programmes and, as with the rest of The Dying of the Ice series, features the sounds of melting and retreating ice in the Arctic along with the sounds of creatures living under the ice as an active, low volume soundtrack audible throughout the programme.

Written and Presented by Andrew McGibbon
Producers: Louise Morris and Nick Romero

A Curtains For Radio production for BBC Radio 4