Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change

Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change are two sonic waterfall installations of compositions created from the field recordings of melting glaciers

The authors, TED Fellows Susie Ibarra (composer, percussionist, sound artist) and Michele Koppes (glaciologist, geographer, climate scientist), have collected the recordings in some of the world’s most important water towers – the Indian Himalayas, Pacific Northwest Coast Mountains, and the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change is a story of climate change told by the ice and water, and speaks to the rapid change and depletion of our glaciers and freshwater sources worldwide. Only 2.5% of water on Earth is freshwater, and of this, 99% comes from glaciers and ice sheets. As glaciers disappear in response to climate change, water availability and water quality are being threatened for the billions who live downstream.

The installation launched simultaneously on 10.10.20 in Vancouver, Canada (Jack Poole Plaza) and Millbrook, NY (Tyrrel Glacial Lake at Innisfree Garden).

Check out the Water Rhythms page on Story Maps.

Credits: Jake Landau (sound recording, engineering); Daniel Neumann (sound design); Rajesh Singh (photography, Varanasi and Sikkim Himalayas); Jason Briner (photo, Greenland); Daniel Code (photography, videography, Vancouver installation); Tony Cenicola (photography, videography, Innisfree installation).

“Through the immersive experience of ‘bathing’ in these disappearing water rhythms while gazing upon the landscapes from which they emerge, Water Rhythms hopes to invite the audience into a deeper contemplation of the ways in which we are all intertwined by freshwater, its beauty and its fragility.”

— Susie Ibarra and Michele Koppes

This work is part of our global art action with Countdown, TED’s global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. We worked with a group of TED Fellows on ten public artworks, all launching on 10.10.2020 in ten cities around the world. The goal – to raise awareness for Countdown, while translating key climate issues in ways that spur imaginations and trigger participation. See all projects here.

THE ARTISTS

A keeper of the stories of ice and stone, Michele Koppes is a Canada Research Chair in Landscapes of Climate Change, an Associate Professor of Geography at University of British Columbia (UBC), the Director of the Climate and Cryosphere Lab and a Senior TED Fellow. Her passion is understanding how glaciers respond to climate change, and their impacts on landscapes, waterscapes and people. She believes deeply in the need for place-based and integrative understandings of the interactions between the ice, the mountains, the ocean, and the people who dwell among them. She spends much of her time exploring and collecting these stories in remote and hard to reach places all over the world, from the mountains of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest to Patagonia, the Himalayas, the Tien Shan, Greenland and Antarctica.

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. She creates immersive experiences through sound to invite people to connect to their natural and built environments. Susie is a 2020 National Geographic Explorer Storyteller, a 2019 Doris Duke United States Artist Fellow in Music, Senior TED Fellow and 2019 Asian Cultural Council Research Fellow in working to preservation and support Indigenous music and culture, Musika Katatubo, in the Philippines, and sound recording on glaciers and water rhythms in the Himalayas. Recent commissions include new release of a composer portrait album Talking Gong Jan 2021 New Focus Recordings, Pulsation for Kronos String Quartet’s 50 for the Future Feb 2020, and a participatory performance game piece Fragility Etudes for her band DreamTime Ensemble for Asia Society Triennial 2021.