Nature:1 Electro-acoustic Composers: 0

Someone linked me to these amazing sounds of ice cracking, which sound a hell of a lot like lasers from Star Wars. Go click and listen, they're amazing.

I don't know the details of the physics, except inasmuch as I understand that it relates to the speed that the different frequencies of sound travel through the medium of ice. So the high frequencies travel faster, the low slower, and that results in these huge glissandi (aka doo! doo! laser zaps).

Ages back another friend linked me to this footage from a Herzog documentary, where scientists are listening to the sounds of the Weddell seals. It's quite amazing, bordering on unbelievable.
If you can read this it means you're missing an embedde video. Click "View Original Post".

I got suspicious to the point where I went hunting around for more. Thankfully some institute called the Macaulay Library has hours and hours of streaming audio examples of the Weddell seals doing their thing, as well as plenty of recordings of Bearded seals (or, "Xenakis seals" as I like to think of them). Man. It's doing my head in.

There's a great recording from the 60s where you heard the recordist saying "I'm now switching on my hydrophone". :D