The Silent Continent? Textual Responses to the Soundscapes of Antarctica

Abstract

Although humans tend to prioritize the visual over the acoustic in day-to-day life (Posner, Nissen and Klein), the Antarctic icescape threatens to up-end this sensory hierarchy.Performance studies specialist Mike Pearson notes the "primacy [in Antarctica] of sound over sight," adding that "the ear [is] ever attuned to the cracking of ice" (27). Many of the diaries and published accounts of early exploration of the continent, as well as more recent narratives based on journeys to and across the ice, include myriad references to the unique soundscapes of the region. These typically describe sounds produced by Antarctica's glaciers, icebergs and other forms of ice, its distinctive wildlife, and its highly changeable and often extreme wind conditions. Above all other aural elements encountered in Antarctica, however, silence has become the most prominent recurring theme in the literature since the earliest days of human exploration of the continent.The word 'silence' is often used to describe a perceived lack of sound, although some writers clearly adopt a broader definition that encompasses low-level environmental sounds, resonating more with the conceptions of silence put forward by John Cage (8, 22-23), R.Murray Schafer (256) and Gordon Hempton (Hempton and Grossmann). While in recent decades developments in sound recording technologies have enabled the recording and representation of many of Antarctica's different types of soundscapes, silence (even if understood as low-level ambient sound) tends to be far more difficult to captureaurally, it often loses meaning outside its context. To think about this key component of Antarctic soundscapes, then, we need to turn to written texts which record subjective responses to silence and give it particular significance. Similarly, existing literature and historical documents provide the only "earwitness accounts" (Schafer 8) of historical experiences of Antarctic soundscapes. Through these texts, we can begin to understand some of the various

Antarctic representation in print media during the emergence of COVID-19

“…If it is through the media that we gain a ‘sense of living in a world, a horizon of world events’ (Couldry 2012: 25), then it is particularly pertinent to examine media representations of Antarctica, which is physically inaccessible for the majority of humankind. As the most mediated place on Earth (Glasberg 2012), the global public has engaged with the continent through newspaper reports and diaries from the Heroic Era, through to film, literature, television, radio and other forms of mass media in contemporary times (see Leane 2004, 2012a, 2012b, 2018, Nielsen 2016, Philpott & Leane 2021).…”

“…The Norwegian Roald Amundsen famously arrived in Hobart, Australia’s southernmost capital, after travelling to the South Pole, only to sequester himself inside a hotel room sworn to secrecy, as the rights to his story had been sold to a London newspaper 1 . Since then, mediated representation of Antarctica has been examined through analysis of film, literature, music, advertising (Nielsen 2017, Leane 2018, Philpott & Leane 2021) and other forms of mass media, 2 which make up a global industry. We ‘live in mediatised times’ (Cottle 2006), and the public receives most of its information and entertainment through the media (O‘Shaughnessy & Stadler 2005), which has a powerful role in shaping public opinion through its agenda-setting role (McCombs & Shaw 1972) and its construction of ideas of reality (Couldry & Hepp 2018).…”