The Cross-disciplinary Aesthetics of Body, Sound and Science—The Experiment of AquaSonic

Text: Angus McPherson
(Deputy Editor of Limelight, Australia’s classical music and arts magazine)

Humans have long been fascinated by worlds, real and imagined, below the surface of the water. We can see it in the popularity of aquariums, folk-tales about sea-sprites and mermaids, and the depictions of underwater realms in art― from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to Debussy’s musical painting of the underwater cathedral of Ys in the piano prelude La cathédrale engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral). With much of the ocean depths still unexplored today, aquatic domains hold a sense of fascination and mystery not unlike that of the heavens.

A century on from Debussy’s prelude, Danish experimental music ensemble Between Music is tapping into that same sense of wonder, exploring the as yet uncharted possibilities of underwater music, combining science, sound and theatre in an immersive work unlike any other.

AquaSonic―which sees the band’s five members perform submerged in an array of large water tanks―debuted at the Operadagen Festival in Rotterdam in 2016, where it was dubbed “spectacular and ground-breaking” by De Volkskrant critic Frits van der Waa. It has since been performed in Denmark, France, Russia, Scotland, Lithuania, Australia, Norway and Germany and―thanks to the project’s novelty combined with stunning imagery and videos―has become something of a viral sensation online.

AquaSonic was a project more than ten years in the making, evolving from an idea in 2002 by Between Music’s co-founder and Artistic Director Laila Skovmand, who had graduated the year before from Denmark’s Royal Academy of Music, where she specialised in “wordless” singing. Curious about how her voice might interact acoustically with liquid surfaces, she began experimenting with singing into a bowl of water, eventually immersing her mouth. While initial experiments did not bear much fruit, she persisted over several years, and buoyed by two weeks of workshopping at an artists’ laboratory, she eventually developed a vocal technique for underwater singing that involved holding an air bubble in her mouth and singing through it. Using this technique, short, higher pitched tones are produced most effectively and the result is an eerily dream-like pulsing timbre.

Skovmand was not content to create underwater music with voice alone, however, and was soon experimenting with other instruments to identify which ones could be used underwater (and how), building over the next decade the project that would become AquaSonic.

Nevertheless, the fact that he has been frequently criticised by purists and cultural watchdogs in his home country for experimenting with, or breaking the rules of, his tradition, is another piece of evidence of the fact that in many parts of Asia tradition and contemporaneity are two worlds apart. At the same time, he has frequently engaged in collaborations with international dance and theatre artists―recently the Japanese playwright and director Toshiki Okada, the visual artist Tomoko Soda, and the Taiwanese dancer Chen Wu-kang, among others.

Submerging instruments presented the musicians of Between Music with different challenges to those of the voice. Aside from the issue of materials (the first cheap violin used in experiments collapsed after a matter of days and the band uses a carbon fibre fiddle now) the acoustics of water are completely different to those of air. Sound waves travel four times faster in water, for instance, and through experimentation the musicians realized that the placement of an instrument within a tank of water― which itself becomes a large resonating chamber―could affect the instrument’s volume. Working with acousticians, the band has measured out the placement of every single instrument in each tank in their performance.

“It was a big struggle in the early stages to get the instrument sound equal every time, and we couldn’t understand why they sounded really good one day and really bad the next,” Between Music’s co-founder and Innovative Director Robert Karlsson said in an interview with Justine Nguyen. “But gradually we found out that there are many factors: the temperature of the water―even two or three degrees hotter or colder affects the sound―how much air there is in the water, or where to place the instruments.”

While Between Music uses a number of pre-existing instruments, such as the violin (played by Karlsson and producing a rich, scratchy timbre underwater reminiscent of an old LP recording), percussion instruments (including bell plates, gongs, triangles and darboukha played by Dea Marie Kjeldsen and Morten Poulsen) and even singing bowls. The band also collaborated with instrument makers and inventors to create a suite of new instruments especially crafted for the underwater environment.

Canadian scientist Steve Mann invented the first hydraulophone― which produces sound through the manipulation of flowing water―in 1985 and since then has built, alongside his colleague Ryan Janzen, a whole family of the instruments. Between Music commissioned Janzen in 2014 to build the band’s own unique hydraulophone, which is played by Skovmand.

The crystallophone, which Karlsson plays, was created based on Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica by US software developer, composer and inventor Andy Cavatorta, who has also collaborated with Björk. Comprising a series of rotating glass bowls, turned with a pedal and played with the fingers, the instrument produces a sweet, ethereal tone similar to that created by running a moistened finger around the lip of a wine glass. Cavatorta created another instrument for the band, the rotacorda―played by Nanna Bech―which is essentially an adaptation of the hurdy gurdy. Like the crystallophone, the rotacorda uses friction to create sound― a wheel, turned by a hand crank vibrates the strings to produce a moaning violin-like tone.

While the newly created instruments are fascinating in and of themselves, they also play an important musical role, filling out the harmonies and providing drones and longer tones to contrast the quicker decay―especially underwater―of the percussion instruments. Combined with percussion, violin and the voices of Skovmand and Bech, the instruments allow for a diverse and complex musical world that includes driving rhythmic patterns and ostinatos―a low gong evokes a powerful bass drum while a smaller drum stands in for a snare―weaving melodic lines and whale-song-like vocals, in compositions that themselves went through a process of experimentation and workshopping almost as intensive as mastering the instruments.

It is not just the music, however, that makes AquaSonic a compelling performance: Between Music has created a finely crafted, almost ritualistic, piece of theatre. While the performance relies on elements of novelty and surprise―such as the unveiling of new sounds first heard in darkness before the source is illuminated―the musicians also draw lines back to earlier musical traditions. This is apparent not only in the reworkings of older mechanical instruments, such as the hurdy gurdy, but also in the costuming―the musicians immerse themselves in their tanks fully clothed in concert dress, the floating cloth a beautiful reminder of the strangeness of the experience and how far from the traditional concert hall we have come. Between the tanks, pipes and brassy old-world instruments there is more than a hint of steam-punk to the aesthetic.

AquaSonic also harnesses a primal sense of ritual, embracing a sound world that Skovmand has likened to being inside the womb. The choreographed breathing of the musicians, who breach the water to inhale periodically like exhibits in a strange aquarium, adds a sense of unreality and ceremony to the proceedings, heightening the mood of mystery and wonder.

The flooded stage, against which light reflects and flickers, adds to this atmosphere―the audience could be in an ancient temple. Adalsteinn Stefansson’s lighting design is evocative but also cleverly structural, drawing the eye to the source of each mysterious sound, highlighting the contours of the music while guiding the audience through an unfamiliar musical universe.

The end result is a theatrical performance that combines science experiment with art installation, musical composition with other-worldly ritual. Between Music have, over the course of this project, solved many of the problems inherit in performing music underwater, and in so doing have created a concert that pays tribute to, rather than simply harnesses, the mysteries of the deep.