After 25 years, we have accumulated a large library of the these recordings. As funding permits, we are now archiving this media onto a hard drive.
Interspecies director, Jim Nollman often presents this work to audiences around the world as a Powerpoint presentation. Lately, striving to give audiences a more direct experience of whale sounds, he has been performing underwater concerts where the audience float in a heated pool,with the sound playing through underwater speakers to enter a person's body by vibrating the skull and plexus.
This new medium demands a new format. The layering and looping techniques of Techno music do the job exceedingly well. In 2003, Interspecies received a small grant to produce a source CD of hundreds of underwater animal sounds, with the intention of offering them to composers to create their own computer music. The animals represented include beluga whales, blue whales, orcas, dolphins, seals, walrus, lobster, fish, as well as re-samples, and even a spoken account about the process of interspecies communication.
This production has since developed into a collaboration with greenmuseum.org, entitled The Belly of the Whale Project. You can download a few of these samples, in mp3 format, to create your own techno music. We'd like to hear the result.
The Belly of the Whale is a perfect example of Interspecies' ongoing sponsorship of artists to re-connect with nature. It currently involves 40 composers from 10 countries. Each composer has recorded a 2-6 minute piece of music, primarily using the samples on our source CD. Interspecies and Greenmuseum eventually plan to release a commercial CD. We also plan to exhibit theese compositions on our websites. We also have a DVD showcasing a music video from the project. Email us if you'd like a copy.
(The next page explains whale calls as an indicator of whale language and consciousness.)
