Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

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Work Overview

There are many ways to tell the future.

Dark Oceanography integrates climate science with experimental music, modelling ocean currents (mesoscale eddies) in spatial audio and percussion. This work invites the audience to experience the vitality of ocean systems as they are imagined in a sunken future off the east coast of Australia. In doing so, Dark Oceanography contributes to an interdisciplinary and intercultural lineage of human speculation that looks to water to understand the passage of time.

Dark Oceanography is, however, a work of fiction-it sounds a waterworld that will never come to pass. The dataset that propels the music around the performance space was extrapolated from existing ocean systems data from 1991 (a relatively neutral year for global atmospheric conditions), stretching several hundred years into an unreal future. The motion of the eddy is one of continuous return, a kind of amnesia where 1991 is iteratively remembered in new forms. With complex processing and significant computational power, we have circumvented the many perils of the Anthropocene as it has devastated natural systems in the early 21st Century, preserving ocean currents in the South Pacific in fragile, perpetual motion.

Dark Oceanography is, therefore, not only a maverick climate model, but also a stage for utopian theatre, where the percussionists perform our collective (albeit futile) hopes for an undamaged future. Their sound is transported away from its acoustic point of origin, mingling fluidly within the digital spin system that engulfs the audience. Bodies circulate and merge: "We experience ourselves less as isolated entities and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation" (Neimanis, 2017). The piece descends through the dataset in three stages from the ocean's surface to nearly one kilometre underwater; the soundworld swells, an inverse energy cascade into the deep unknown.

Significantly, the impact of anthropocentric climate change on the ocean's current systems is unknown, and the risk to humans and non-humans alike incalculable. It is in the face of this precarious unknown that we feel most compelled to predict, forecast, prophesise-to somehow dredge sediment from a murky future that necessarily flows beyond our reach. Dark Oceanography, as a confluence of arts-science methods for thinking about the future, is also necessarily an exercise in scaffolding the unknown.

Work Details

Year: 2025

Instrumentation: Percussion trio and multi-channel spatial amplification.

Duration: 48 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

First performance: 27 Jul 25. David Li Sound Gallery, Melbourne, VIC

Collaboratively developed by a team of artistic and scientific researchers, Dark Oceanography is part of the 'Sonic Vocabularies: Climate Weather and Music' project. The work was commissioned by The Sound Collectors Lab with financial support from the Australian Research Council. This project was supported by the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century, and Monash University Performing Arts Centres.