South Pole Episode 18: Antarctic Musicology and the Not So Silent Continent
Dive into the fascinating world of Antarctic musicology in this episode of *South Pole*. Explore how music, soundscapes, and even silence shape our understanding of the icy continent. Dr. Carolyn Philpott, a senior lecturer and researcher, shares her journey into the interdisciplinary study of music, place, and environment. Discover the sounds of Antarctica—from cracking icebergs to the lively cacophony of penguin colonies—and learn how composers capture the essence of this remote landscape. Whether you’re a music lover or an Antarctica enthusiast, this episode highlights how sound and art foster deeper connections with the natural world. Grab your headphones for an immersive auditory adventure into the heart of the silent continent.
Episode Guest: Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Learn more about Dr. Philpott here
Browse Dr. Philpott’s Publications here
Connect with Dr. Philpott on LinkedIn
Listen to Vaughn Williams’ Scott of the Antarctic on Youtube
Listen to Penguin Ballet by Nigel Westlake on Spotify
Listen to Seals (Underwater) by Douglass Quinn on YouTube
Listen to Antarctic Sound Recordings by Phillip Samartzis on YouTube
Iceberg Crash by Almaz Khakimov
Episode Transcript and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website
Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia
Hosted, produced, written, and edited by Clark Marchese
Cover art and PFM logo by Laurel Wong.
Theme music by Nela Ruiz
Transcript:
[00:00:09.500] - Clark
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of South Pole, the podcast that explores everything Antarctica. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and today we are talking about silence, soundscapes, Penguin squacks, iceberg cracks. It's time for some Antarctica musicology. All right, so this podcast is meant to be an audio adventure of Antarctica, after all. This particular episode is definitely that. We are going to be listening to some Antarctica music today, so I think we should just jump in. Today, we're speaking with Dr. Carolyn Philpott, who is a senior lecturer in musicology at the University of Tasmania's Conservatorium of Music and an adjunct senior researcher at the University's Institute for Marine and Antartic Studies. Her research interests include the intersection between music, sound, place, and the environment, especially music composed in connection with Antarctica. I will admit, Antartic musicology She was not on my initial brainstorming list when I started this podcast, but I am so glad that we get to cover it today because how cool. Grab your headphones if you don't have them already, and let's get started. All right. Hello. Welcome to the show, Dr. Philpott. The first question I have is if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your research.
[00:01:46.140] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Hi, Clark. Thank you very much for having me. My name is Carolyn Philpott. I'm a musicologist and an Antarctica Studies scholar based at the University of Tasmania in Nippaluna, Hobart. I'm a senior lecturer at the Conservatorium of Music here and also an Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Institute for Marine and Atlantic Studies, which are both part of the university here. Most of my research focuses on how Antarctica is mediated to the public through the creative art, especially music and sound, and also via tourism. It might seem like an unusual career direction for a musicologist, but my interest in Antarctica was actually prompted nearly two decades ago now by a scientist who was working at what is now the Institute for Marine and Atlantic Studies, and who knew that I was undertaking a PhD at the time on music about place, and in that case, Australia. He asked if I could give some lectures to their first year students about Antarctica-related music. Even though he was a scientist, an ecologist, he recognized that the arts are an important way through which people connect with Antarctica and that it could provide an avenue for his students who had not yet had a chance to visit the far south to understand more about it.
[00:03:06.400] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
I jumped at the opportunity to explore Antarctica in my work, and I haven't looked back since.
[00:03:12.180] - Clark
Okay, that's amazing. I'm so very curious about your work, and I have lots of questions for you about it. It's interesting because when I started this podcast, I assumed I'd probably be doing some episodes about how Antarctica was mediated, perhaps how messages about Antarctica reach the public. But I don't think I imagine that we'd be talking about Antarctica musicology, so I'm really happy that we get to do this. It sounds like your interest in music predates your relationship with Antarctica. Maybe I'll ask you first, what means you are interested to study music?
[00:03:38.490] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Well, I started studying music when I was quite young. I remember learning at school like a lot of people do. I quickly decided I wanted to learn piano. I don't know why. I was just fixated on piano. I started playing piano when I was in primary school and then all the way through high school and college. That was focus. I decided I wanted to teach music in some capacity. That was my goal. I ended up teaching at university. But alongside that, I was always really interested in marine biology. And that was my second choice for what I would have studied. It was just really that at that time it was tricky to study that in Tasmania. In the end, I pursued my music studies. But it's interesting how your dual interests in that way will often come together. That's certainly what's happened for me, that I've managed to somehow bring these together.
[00:04:36.640] - Clark
I think that's amazing. I also relate to having not necessarily competing, but concurrent interests. It's really cool when I get to speak to a researcher that operates in two maybe on the surface unrelated fields, but then they teach us how they can actually come together in quite an amazing way. That's great. One question I also like to ask my guests is, have they been to Antarctica? Have you been?
[00:04:58.510] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Yes, I've actually We've been fortunate enough to visit three times now as a researcher, once in 2019 and twice at the beginning of last year, so 2023. In 2019, my university granted me a semester of study leave to focus more on Antarctica-related projects. Until that time, I'd been publishing on music and sound art related to Antarctica, as well as other types of music. But I'd been wanting to explore more topics relating to the Antarctica soundscape itself and the role of the soundscape in people's experiences of the continent. So as part of my study leave, I was able to undertake a trip to the Atlantic Peninsula, leaving from Esuaia in Argentina, to experience Antarctica's soundscapes firsthand. And I was fortunate to be able to undertake the trip with a close colleague and friend of mine, Ellie Lean, a literary scholar and professor of Atlantic Studies, who I know has been on your podcast already.
[00:06:00.170] - Clark
Yes, in season one, Anyone Who Hasn't Listen, it was a really interesting episode about Antartic literature and public perceptions.
[00:06:06.810] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Ellie needed to take a trip as part of a project that she was working on at the time. It was a happy coincidence in a way that we were able to take the trip together. Ellie and I, as well as a few other colleagues here at the University of Tasmania, working in the tourism studies area, were then successful in applying for an Australian Research Council for a project examining the role of tour operators in mediating the Antarctica experience for the guests, as well as studying the role that direct sensory experience plays in the formation of place attachment. So that is how guests' multisensory experience of Antarctica helps them to form connections with this extreme fragile place. I then traveled down to Antarctica with this tourism twice in early last year to interview guests and staff about their expectations and experiences. And those two trips last year were quite an experience for me personally, actually, because between booking the travel and then departing, I found out that I was pregnant with a much long-fall baby. So there was suddenly a mad flurry of medical appointments, a risk assessments. Then about a week before the first trip, just before Christmas, I was given approval to travel I was actually three to four months pregnant with my baby's son at the time I was undertaking the field work in Antarctica.
[00:07:36.840] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
So that in itself is a bit of a story, as I think I might be one of the first, if not the B-first researcher that's actually been permitted to undertake field work in Antarctica while pregnant. It made that Drake passage rather interesting, too.
[00:07:51.320] - Clark
Wow, that's amazing. A little Antarctica baby. That's also a very interesting research that I think it's time to start diving into. There are some vocabulary words that might help us understand it, though, and perhaps the most important one for this conversation, and perhaps we've even jumped ahead of ourselves, but what is musicology? What does a musicologist do? What source of questions do they ask?
[00:08:11.490] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
That's a really big question, but I'll give it a go at answering. A lot of traditional musicologists study music from the past, such as the history of music in a particular place or music of a particular period, like the Baroque or romantic eras, or they We might study works by a significant composer and their contribution to society, for example, while others, especially nowadays, are studying more contemporary and interdisciplinary topics such as the role of music in film or video games, even, the effect of music on our behavior or even the ways in which music and sound are used to express concerns about the environment, including climate change. That's an area that I'm very interested in. There's actually a whole subfield of musicology now devoted to that particular area that's known as Ecomus ecology. As to the type of questions that musicologists ask, it depends, of course, on the subject area. Often we ask questions such as what musical techniques have been used in a particular work, which requires an analytical approach. We're literally analyzing musical scores and sometimes recordings. Often this is combined with historical research to understand the cultural and socio-political context in which a work is being created and then received by an audience.
[00:09:37.530] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Because beyond being an art form, music is fundamentally about humans interacting with each other and trying to understand and communicate with each other, whether that's fellow performers or with an audience. Often questions that musicologists ask are along the lines of what is such and such a composer seeking to convey to an audience through their music and how, so through which musical devices or instruments, for example, and also why are they writing that piece in that way? Are there messages in the music that we can learn from in some way and what is their relevance today? Those are some of the key questions we might ask.
[00:10:18.440] - Clark
A quick aside for Ecomusikology, because I love a vocab word. Ecomusikology is a field that examines the connections between music or sound and the natural environment. This interdisciplinary study spans subjects such as musicology, biology, ecology, and even anthropology. How do I even say this word? Ecomusikological. Ecomusikological works are often more political and critical rather than purely descriptive or interpretive. Similar to other forms of climate or environmental art, Ecomusikology provides new ways to address major issues like climate change by tapping into human emotions. Okay, so it seems like an enormous field of possibilities, and you could even take Ecomusicology alone in a million different directions. I'm imagining some Venn diagrams where musicology, Ecomusikology, and Antarctica have some overlap. How then are you applying musicology to study Antarctica?
[00:11:09.850] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Yeah, a good question. Well, some of my earliest Antarctica research focused on the role of music in expeditions of heroic age of Antarctica Exploration. This continues to be of ongoing interest to me because music formed an important part of how the expedition has filled their time in Antarctica. They frequently listen to recordings on gramophones. They sing popular songs of the day. They played musical instruments together, and they even made up their own songs. We have evidence of these activities in surviving diaries and other materials, including surviving instruments from the expedition, musical instruments, that is, as well as in the published accounts that were produced after the expedition. As a musicologist, I've visited archives such as at the Scott Pola Research Institute in Cambridge and analyzed relevant materials, including pages of song lyrics and references to music making in the diaries that survive from particularly the British and Australasian Antaldy expeditions. Then I've tried to build a picture of how important music was to the men during the expeditions and what roles it served in terms of providing entertainment and promoting well-being, often in extreme circumstances. Then in other work, I've analyzed musical scores like Vawn Williams' Music for the Film God of the Atlantic, which a lot of listeners will hopefully know.
[00:12:59.920] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
For that research project, I visited the archive of his original manuscripts at the British Library and viewed his notes and letters as well as his handwritten musical manuscripts, and I studied them to understand the musical techniques that he used to evoke the eye-scape and underscore the themes of heroism in Scott's story so successfully in that film. For that project, I collaborated with Ellie Lean, who analyzed the film's narrative elements and contextualized them historically. Also a sound studies expert, Douglas Quinn, who's worked extensively in Antarctica as a field recordist, as well as on various films. He provided an excellent analysis of the nonmusical sounds used in the film to represent the Antarctica soundscape. Then in other more recent work, I've analyzed recordings of soundscape compositions that use Antarctica field recordings. Even more recently, I've been investigating the role of silence and sound in visitors' experiences of Antarctica. That's where the tourism work has come in as well. Really, I'm seeking to understand the role that sound in all its manifestations, from silence and natural sound through to anthropogenic sound and even composed music What role that plays in our experience at Antarctica, whether that's through direct bodily experience of the icecape or whether it's from our lounge rooms at home listening to sounds or music that's connected to the place and imagining what it's like to actually be there.
[00:14:46.500] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
So I ask lots of different questions, really.
[00:14:49.150] - Clark
Wow, there's a lot to impact there. And I do have one specific question, though. You mentioned that the expeditioners would sing songs of the day. Is there any examples that come to mind of one popular song that they would always like to sing?
[00:15:02.130] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
They sang, particularly the Australians were really hooked on Gilbert and Sullivan operators. They sang lots of music from the Mikado, for example. They would create their own lyrics that was set to this music. Often the lyrics were about particular members of the team, and they would have lots of in-jokes in them. They're quite funny. When you know more about the different people that made up the expedition, you can certainly see that there's a lot of jokes there intended to be aimed at particular individuals, which make them quite funny.
[00:16:04.100] - Clark
One of the things I want to accomplish in this interview is to gain a sense of what Antartic music would be. It seems like Antartic music, it could be music that people listened to when they were there. It could be composers trying to evoke a sense of adventure to accompany some media about Antarctica, like a documentary. It could be recordings from the field. Is Antartic music even a helpful term?
[00:16:27.430] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Yeah, that's a good question, too. I think some people certainly do call it Antarctica music. I tend to say, Antarctica-related music or music about Antarctica, those sorts of things. Music that is connected with Antarctica tends to, what appears in a surprisingly wide range of different styles and genres, some of which I've already touched on from classical, orchestra music through to field music, popular music, music theater works, and soundscape-based compositions. Some works are obviously and entirely Antarctica-focused, with the name of the continent featuring prominently in the title and any associated text, like the lyrics of a song, while other works include more oblique references to Antarctica and perhaps have an abstract title, they might just have a very subtle suggestion of the place in a lyrics. For me, it's music in which the composer has chosen to make a deliberate association with the place. So Antartic has been a primary influence in the composition of the work, and the composer also wants that to be part of the listener's experience, if you like. And while some composers of this music have visited the continent, especially those using soundscape recordings in their works, many haven't. In that case, their experiences of it have usually been mediated through books, diaries, films, and the visual arts.
[00:17:53.880] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
So Bourne-Williams, for example, didn't have the opportunity to visit. He read about Scott's Expedition through Scott's diaries and through other published accounts of that expedition. Either way, the music can offer a way through which the general public can connect with and learn more about Antarctica, especially, I think, given most people never have the opportunity to visit in person.
[00:18:19.060] - Clark
That's interesting because we've talked a couple of times on the show about how people get introduced to Antarctica, and I'm thinking of my own experience, not necessarily Antarctica-specific, but some of my earliest introductions that sparked my fascination with the environment were these nature documentaries, right? I think David Attenborough, which while they are characterized by stunning imagery and also his narration, they also have these fantastic soundtracks that maybe we take for granted, but they do enhance the experience, I guess, of consuming that media. But on that exact point, how exactly can music be used to foster a connection between a place and people who will never visit it?
[00:18:55.390] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
I think that's a really good question. The The creative arts in general have long been recognized for their capacity to represent places as well as communicate ideas, influence and educate people. Philosophers and human geographists in particular have recognized that the creative arts can evoke a sense of place. That is a feeling that we, as the viewer or the listener or the reader, know what it's like to be in the particular place that's represented by the work. I'd argue that music Music and sound art are just as capable and important as other art forms, and in some cases, can have an even greater impact when it comes to connecting people with place. The reason for this, I think, as do other scholars, is that music, including sound art, is a temporal art form, and it's a nonverbal language, although sometimes, of course, a text is included depending on the genre. And because music unfolds over time, it has a particular really strong capacity to trigger emotional responses in a listener. So research has shown that when listening to music, especially music we enjoy, dopamine is released in the brain, and that's the same chemical that's released when people fall in love.
[00:20:14.780] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
For for example. So if dopamine is released when people are listening to music about a place, then it can help them to feel a sense of connection or care for that place. And composers know that music can affect the emotions as well as affect us physically biologically, such as by altering our heart rate, either up or down. And you can feel that for yourself if you go into a nightclub or somewhere where there's fast, loud music, and your heart rate will naturally try to adjust to the tempo of the music that you're listening to. Composers will often exploit these techniques to encourage listeners to feel emotions in alignment with what they're representing. If you think about a film music, for example, I know you're talking about that before. If you've ever watched a film with the sound turned down, it often dramatically reduces the emotional effect of a scene. Something that could seem very scary with a dramatic musical score accompanying it could suddenly not seem that scary or intense anymore. Similarly, if you're viewing a film about Antarctica or even visiting a museum exhibit, for example, about Antarctica, the soundtrack or the background sounds can have a very direct impact on how you feel about what you are seeing and place that's represented as a whole, even if you don't realize that the music or the soundscape is having that impact on you at the time.
[00:21:39.010] - Clark
It's literally making me think of the last time I went to the aquarium, and they always have that music that, I guess, makes you feel like you're underwater?
[00:21:49.520] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
In this way, music can help audiences to feel a sense of connection to the place that otherwise might seem so distant from their everyday lives. The United Nations as well has recognized music as one of the most powerful mediums to communicate environmental messages to billions of people worldwide, irrespective of their race, their religion, their income, their gender or age. It's not just me, obviously, that's trying to make these comments as well.
[00:22:19.950] - Clark
Okay, then this is actually hugely important because we also talk a lot on the show about the importance of the public having a consciousness and a care for Antarctica. If this is a way for us to foster that, that's something that we should be looking into and learning more about. There is another vocabulary word that I want to ask you about. I've heard it a couple of times already today, which is soundscape. Can you tell us what a soundscape is and also what we understand the Antarctica soundscape to be?
[00:22:47.320] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Yeah, okay. I'll do my best to define that. A soundscape is what you would hear in your immediate surroundings if you are in a particular place at at a particular time. It's very changeable. There'll be elements like what we call biological sounds, which might be bird calls, for example. Then there might be what we call geophysical sound sources, which would be the wind or the rain or snow, if you're in Antarctica or another cold place. Then there are also antigenic sound sources, such as our own breathing or talking, clicking of a camera in Antarctica, for example. There's a range of different types of sound sources that will make up a soundscape, and it will vary at any given moment in time. Then something else I've talked about is soundscape composition, which is where sound artists will go out into the field and record the soundscape of a given place at a given time in the hope of then conveying to their listeners a sense of their own experience of that place.
[00:23:59.100] - Clark
I'm imagining I'm imagining wind, I'm imagining the crash of ocean waves, I'm imagining birds, and I'm imagining silence, which is also something I want to ask you about because I know your research touches on silence, too. Can you speak to the place that silence holds in the Antarctica soundscape and what relation or connection that has with people's experiences?
[00:24:18.300] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Yeah, that's a really good question. And this idea of silence comes up in relation to Antarctica so much. It's often referred to as the silent continent, name appears in many book titles, for example, over the last few decades. So it's very much part of what we associate with Antarctica and its soundscape. However, what most people term silence, which is a perceived lack of sound, is not really what I would say is the true experience of Antarctica. So a lot of people will use the word silent, refer to a lack of sound. But actually, what they probably mean is natural quiet, this sense that you're out in the landscape or the ice-cape, and that there's an absence of human sounds or anthropogenic sounds, and that you're able to just listen to the sound of the place. It's natural sounds.
[00:25:16.870] - Clark
Okay, interesting difference between actual silence and natural quiet, which I think we can flat a bit, right? Because if you're in a bustling city soundscape and you go to a park or a hike, you'll hear the bustling of pine needles or birds tripping, and You might say, Finally, it's some quiet, right? But it's not actually silence.
[00:25:35.910] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
In a place like Antarctica, of course, we refer to it as one place, a continent, but there's also many places on the continent that make up that place as a whole. The soundscapes will vary depending on where the location is, whether it's on the Coast, for example, as opposed to the interior, and then what's happening in the weather at that time, whether it's extremely windy or whether it's completely calm, and then there's no sounds of wind or other geophysical sounds like snow, for example. A lot of people describe it as a silent continent, and a lot of tourists want to go there to experience the silence. But it's quite funny in a way or ironic that most visitors, most tourists go to the Antarctica Peninsula, and those visits occur in January or February when the peninsula is far from its island. There's actually a lot going on in terms of animal life. The penguins and whales and so on are raising their young The penguins make a cacophony of different localizations as they do that. Basically, all of the tourist landing sites are where Penguin rookeries are. Then there'll be whales that are surfacing regularly, exhaling loudly loudly next to the ship or zodiacs while they're feeding.
[00:27:05.800] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Then you'll have glaciers that are generating loud, booming, and cracking sounds as they push ice towards the water's edge and carve icebergs. Then, of course, the changeable weather conditions create an almost constant sonic backdrop that ranges from really gentle blowing winds through so raging blizzards. Then, of course, as tourist numbers continue to increase each season, humans are also increasingly contributing to the Atlantic soundscape. You probably know that there was a new record of over 122,000 visitors that was reached during the last season, 2023, 2024. Most Most tourists undertake those expedition-style cruises that land at various sites. They're typically ferried between the ship and landing sites in noisy engine-powered zodiacs. Then they'll hike around the landing sites in heavy boots, chatter amongst themselves, and take thousands of photographs with their cameras that make electronic clicks. The soundscape really varies depending on the specific site that's visited and the wildlife and other weather, what's happening there at any given moment. However, I'd say that the typical tourist experience of Antarctica is not exactly a silent one. But having said that, it might be possible for scientists and the small number of tourists who venture into the deep field away from lots of other humans and the wildlife on the coastline to experience something closer to silence.
[00:28:42.260] - Clark
When I interview scientists for the show, sometimes I don't include it in the episode, but I often ask them for a list of words that hey would use to describe Antarctica. I do believe that silence or quiet has come up quite a couple of times. But we have to remember these are researchers or scientists who will have ventured, I guess, beyond these tourist destinations. But it's interesting that that's a very reoccurring theme that I picked up on from talking to a lot of researchers and asking them about their experiences down there.
[00:29:07.300] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
That's really interesting to hear. I should say that our experiences of soundscapes are also shaped by our own backgrounds and our expectations. If we've only ever lived in a big city, we might consider Antarctica's soundscape to be very quiet or silent in comparison. But if you live in a naturally quiet area, like I do in a more rural setting, then you might notice more subtle sounds.
[00:29:33.270] - Clark
Absolutely. That makes sense. Now, I've been dying to ask you, what are your thoughts on the music for this podcast? Because I had quite a think before I spoke to the composer Sure. A shout out to Naila Ruiz, who did our theme music. But I was thinking about what it should sound like and how to describe what I wanted it to sound like to a composer. So let me play you a bit of it and then maybe we can get your thoughts.
[00:30:29.960] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Yeah, I think it's very catchy. It's contemplative in mood, it has quite a strong rhythm to it. It reminds me, as I mentioned, it reminds me of Vangelus's Antardic music, which is produced with a synthesizer and is quite minimalistic in sound. I have heard a lot of people say that that more minimalist music is a really good match to the interior of Antarctica, at least. I know a scientist who said to me, for him, Vangelus's Antartic music was the quintessential sound track for the flying into and landing on plane in Antarctica.
[00:31:24.300] - Clark
Okay, that's very interesting feedback. Let me read you what I said in my initial email to the composer. I said some practical things, too, about how long it should be. There needs to be a beginning, a middle, and an end. But here's what I said about the Antarctica part. Okay, I'm quoting myself. There are a couple of directions we could go. It could be cinematic and grand. Other themes of Antarctica could include some science and discovery as well as Peace and Solitude. Then I also mentioned that the podcast is part of a brand of science podcast, so the music should also strike a balance between like, heartedness without detracting from some of the more serious and rigorous scientific discussions. Then I gave her some examples of music to emulate from documentaries and such. So, yeah, that's what I gave her to work with, and this is what she came up with.
[00:32:05.420] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Yeah, I think it's perfect for your podcast. I hope you're happy with it as well.
[00:32:10.230] - Clark
Oh, I love it. Yeah. I'm curious, as someone who's heard a lot of it, do you have a favorite piece of Antarctica music?
[00:32:18.570] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
That's a really hard one for me to answer, but I'll try. For me, it's hard to go past Bourne-Williams music, which I've talked about already. That he's film music for Scotta the Atlantic, which he reworked into his famous Sinfonia Antartica in the early 1950s, and that's still regularly performed by orchestras in concert halls around the world today. It just evokes the theme of heroism and the grandeour of the icecape so beautifully from its opening theme onwards. Then I have another favorite, if I'm allowed to have more than one, which is quite another... It's another well-known work in Australia, especially. It's by an Australian composer, Nigel West Lake, his Antarctica Suite, which is a guitar concerto in several movements, and the Tasmanian orchestras recorded that work as well. One of the movements of that work is titled Penguin Ballet. It's just a gorgeous portrayal of the lividness of penguins darting around underwater. It's very playful and very easy to listen to, including, I think, for those who don't usually listen to classical music. Then because There's so many different genres, I would say, of soundscape compositions. My favorite are probably those by Douglas Quinn, who produced some ground-breaking recordings of wet or sealed underwater.
[00:33:42.660] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
His recordings were the first of their kind They're just unbelievable recordings. There's an Australian, Philip Samaats, as well, who's recorded soundscapes around Australia's Antartic Station. All of this work you can look up on YouTube. You're not readily available to access. But I could keep going on, but they're just some of my favorites.
[00:34:05.370] - Clark
Okay, so you just heard some of those examples that were royalty free, but I'll put links to the rest in the episode description.
[00:34:10.430] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Yeah, you should.
[00:34:11.750] - Clark
All right, as we are coming towards the end, before I ask you where people can find you and follow your work, is there anything that we didn't talk about today that you think is important to mention in the discussion about music in Antarctica or any final comments more generally?
[00:34:25.190] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
I think just one thing that I haven't really mentioned is the value of arts residency programs in enabling artists, including composers, musicians, and sound artists, to visit Antarctica. And while the visit isn't necessarily essential to the creation of a great piece of music, as I've already mentioned, For those who have undertaken residencies, the experience has been incredibly invaluable. And I know this because I'm involved in another large project called Creative Antarctica, in which we've interviewed over 50 Australian creative artists and writers who have undertaken residencies in Antarctica, including composers and sound artists. Having experienced the continent firsthand, they can then share their experiences with huge audiences, which can have an immeasurable impact. Some of the arts residency programs have been closing or reducing the number of artists they've been sending. But I think this is a real shame as the experience can have a massive impact on a wide range of people beyond the single artist that's experiencing it. So that's one aspect that I thought I probably should mention as well.
[00:35:35.180] - Clark
Yeah, especially because we already talked about how, I guess, music specifically, but art in general, can have such an impact on people's care and consciousness, and then how important care and consciousness is. I would say that's an investment that should definitely be maintained. Maybe quickly, I'll just mention to listeners, I already started putting together season 3 of South Pole, and we will have an episode with an artist who did a residency in Antarctica. I think that'll be a really interesting chat. All right, then. Well, the last question is, where can people find you and follow your work?
[00:36:01.790] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
I have a profile page on the University of Tasmania website. If you just Google my name and UTAS, that should pop up. I'm not particularly active on social media, but I do have a LinkedIn account, so that might be another way for people to contact me. I'm very happy to be contacted through either of those channels.
[00:36:23.420] - Clark
Perfect. All of those links will be in the episode description for anyone who's interested to find them easily. This is the part where I say thank so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thank you for teaching us about Antartic musicology and also for your important research in this space.
[00:36:37.690] - Dr. Carolyn Philpott
Thank you so much, Tark. It's been a pleasure.
[00:36:52.990] - Clark
You've been listening to South Pole. You can find more information about this week's guests and links to their work in the episode description. To cover art for the show was done by Laurel Wong, and the wonderful Antartic music you're listening to was done by Nela Ruiz. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and this episode was produced and engineered by me. If you found it interesting, send it to someone you know. South Pole is part of a larger network of sciencey podcast called Pineforest Media. We've got one on plastic, one on drinking water, and a couple of new ones coming out soon. You can find more information about us in the episode description or on our website at pineforestpods. Com. We're also on Instagram and TikTok at Pineforest Media. If you love the show and you want to support science communication like this, a five-star rating across platforms and a review on Apple podcast is one of the best things you can do to help science reach more people and for our entire network to grow. Thank you to all of you who have made it this far, and we'll chat soon.
