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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Icelandic traditional music practices have meaningfully shaped the human ecology of glaciers in Iceland for centuries, and the extent to which the integration of soundscape recordings with folk melodies can influence environmental sentiments and mitigation efforts today.

Paper long abstract:

In 1912, in the wane of the Little Ice Age, a mother sings an Icelandic lullaby, “...í jöklinum hljóða dauðadjúpar sprungur” (“...in the glacier, death-deep cracks rumble”). Within this example, both musical melody and sonic descriptors evidence glacial morphology, and foreground the act of listening as a texture of everyday life. Glacial “cracks rumble” alongside a human voice to form an inseparable legacy between nature and culture—as both mother and ice resonate prescient stories of love and loss. Today, as glaciers in Iceland melt at unprecedented rates, sound and listening remain significant to how people experience glaciers, environmental change, and the climate crisis more broadly.

While a burgeoning collective of audio engineers, acoustic ecologists, and sound artists have flocked to Iceland’s disappearing ice to measure noise pollution, create activist-art, or curate last-chance sound archives, this paper centers on the lesser-known significance of Icelandic traditional music to glaciological knowledge. By analyzing several folk songs alongside corresponding environmental data, I aim to show how music has meaningfully shaped the human ecology of glaciers in Iceland for centuries, and the extent to which music can influence environmental sentiments and mitigation efforts today. To this end, I examine contemporary adaptions of folk melodies that incorporate natural soundscape recordings within their production as means for environmental activism and awareness. Drawing from my own interdisciplinary ethnographic research and natural soundscape recordings in Iceland, I hope to show how the sounds and songs of glaciers can help us navigate environments undergoing rapid change, transformation, and melt.