A death rattle is the sounds a human body makes at the end of life when fluid enters the lungs. The sounds associated with this process and the parallels between human and ice bodies led to our work using seismic recordings of glacial calving events to compose a death rattle for Thwaites Glacier. 

Calving events are triggered by the progressive growth of cracks and void space in the ice at the terminus of marine-terminating glaciers (Schulson, 1990; Vaughan, 1993; van der Veen, 1999). 

To build this composition Andrew applied an automated “event picker” (Winberry et al., 2020) to identify calving events in broadband 3-component seismic data collected between 2009 and 2020 from a remote station anchored to the surface of Thwaites Glacier (76.45 S, 107.78 W).

For each event, the seismic recording was shifted to human-audible frequencies. Tyler then converted these timeseries to audio files and mixed them into compositions designed for live accompaniment with ringing bells, vocalizations, and amplified sounds of rocks in contact with one another.