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Om Seismograf

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Sounding migrations

Deep listening and the acoustic phenology of whale song

Af
  • Alex South
18. september 2025

Abstract

The migrations of baleen whales generally go little noticed, yet they have a profound effect on underwater sonic milieux. Seasonal fluctuations in the songs of the humpback, minke, and sei whales are underpinned by the near-constant subsonic bass pulse of the fin whale. As underwater acoustic monitoring is helping to reveal, migration routes and timings of these top predators are shifting in response to changing ocean temperatures. Such monitoring allows whales to be used as climate sentinels, facilitates conservation efforts, and also offers the prospect of building on public »whale listening« projects such as OrcaSound. Widening public access to underwater acoustic data would permit an active deep listening with the potential of generating a fuller engagement with marine environments, complementing the everyday awareness of birdsong that connects even urban citizens of industrial societies to the more-than-human world. Using underwater recordings from the North Atlantic supplied by the Marine Directorate of the Scottish Government I simulate the yearly pattern of cetacean song, aiming to show the listener that different species are readily distinguished and »good to listen with«: they attract and hold the attention, extending our sense of dwelling in a world always already experienced by other sentient beings.

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kritik

When Mysticism Loses Its Magic

This year’s Rued Langgaard Festival set out to open the gate to Danish mysticism, but at times disappeared itself into a haze of filler and gimmickry – though a few concerts stood strong.

Af
  • Jeppe Rönnow
18. september 2025
© PR

Real-time norms

Grooves, drones, and sense-making in experimental improvised music

Af
  • Christopher A. Williams,
  • Joshua Bergamin
18. september 2025

Kortkritik

© PR

Treen In Free Fall – And In Common Flow

»On their second release ‘Kaikō’, Treen show how free improvisation can balance between independence and shared direction – carried by trust, gravity, and an organic flow.«

Kortkritik

© Rene Passet

In a Warm Bed of Darkness

»At Alice, Gintė Preisaitė and Drew McDowall showed how electronic music can be both unsettling and enveloping.«

Peer

© Login/Shutterstock.com

Sounds of Science

6 April 2021 – Our new peer-reviewed special edition on composition, recording and listening as laboratory practice. Ten audio papers, two in-depth articles and an introduction by editors Henrik Frisk and Sanne Krogh Groth.

‘Every time we listen to music or make music, we are at the same time creating social relations or socialities’

Gender and social relations in New Music: Tackling the octopus
A conversation with Georgina Born

Collection

Marcela Lucatelli. © Marcela Lucatelli

Meet the composers

Some of them are just getting started. Others are well-established names on the international scene. But what are their thoughts on the music they create and the world they live in? Read a selection of our most interesting pieces on composers and composing.

Guide

© Nev Lilit

My name is Nev Lilit – would you like to see my playlist?

»Music is so many things, and arises in so many different forms every day. Music is also an art form, which, like all art, needs to be constantly renewed and deepened in order to be relevant.«

© PR

Female Composers in 20th-century Electronic Music

© PR

On the Typical, the Indistinct and the Impersonal in the Sonic Arts, Media and Auditory Culture

About

Seismograf

Welcome to Seismograf

Seismograf is an independent Danish web magazine focusing on the newest developments within the arts of sound. On this page you will find our most recent English-language content as well as collections on selected topics. Want to know more about Seismograf? Then go on and scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Collection

© Anna Cokorilo

Around the world with Seismograf

Seismograf may be located in Denmark, but brilliant music is performed all over the world. Which means we often cover events in places far, far away, as illustrated by this selection of articles.

Essays

© PR

Shoes For People Who Don’t Like Music

An anti-anthem for those who fall asleep at concerts and wake up with Cage talking nonsense.
Douglas Kahn 4. august 2025
Barents Spektakel. © Nima Taheri

2024: An Earful of Chaos 

Chaotic times call for chaotic music. But also soft techno, flutists and yoga balls. Jennifer Gersten and Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek wrap up the musical year in a conversation between New York and Aarhus.
Jennifer Gersten 29. december 2024
Valentina Goncharova. © Shukai / Quietus

Gender, Canon, and Eastern European Women Pioneers of 20th-century Electronic Music

Feminist readings of 20th-century electronic music history cannot avoid questioning the notion of canon and canon-oriented historiographical practices. Shedding light on women composers from non-Western contexts can further come in handy in searching for ways to engage with the history of gender in music beyond mainstreaming and the rhetoric of exceptionalism.
Marta Beszterda van Vliet 24. november 2024
© Lisbeth Damgaard

Another day, another rediscovery of Else Marie Pade

A good twenty years after the first rediscovery of Else Marie Pade as an electronic pioneer, she is now being branded as a visionary acoustic composer. It seems we never get tired of rewriting the story of this special artist – and writing ourselves into it.
Sune Anderberg 20. august 2024
© PR

Death and Masochism

Efterskrift enjoy the discomfort of pleasure postponed or expressed through the pain of the feeling of something missing. At the new festival MINU, the Aarhus-based ensemble will perform a concert with a simple message: everything good is allowed to die.
Macon Holt 4. november 2022
© PR

Actual Friends, Making New Maps from the Future

How do you make sense in a world filled with tragedy, grief and institutional control? In their work for MINU festival composer Conor McLean and performer Nikolaus von Bemberg turn to Charlie Kaufman’s film, »Synechdoche, New York« for answers.
Macon Holt 4. november 2022
Cover til The Sounds of Earth Record. ©  Wikimedia Commons

Alien Frequencies

The mixtape has always been a format with which to swagger and seduce, meant to project both front and vulnerability. How, though, might we interpret a sampler from another star system; what might its effect on us be? A journey with Ziggy Stardust, Yuri Gagarin, afrofuturists and intellectuals from Mars.
Ben Carver 27. Oktober 2022
© Laura Toxværd

»My pregnant body changed things – composing with the process«

Sounding Women's Work | In a situation where the gender balance is skewed in favor of men, it takes action to change the balance so no one has a special advantage, says composer, saxophonist and author Laura Toxværd. 
Laura Toxværd 25. Maj 2022
© Eget værelse

On stage we are four bodies

Sounding Women's Work | Meshes is a performance groupe with drummers and dancers. They work with the relation between body and sound and investigates how the movement of the body can be translated into a score for a drum set, and how the sound of a drum set can be translated into a score for movement.
Meshes 10. Februar 2022

Reviews

When Mysticism Loses Its Magic

This year’s Rued Langgaard Festival set out to open the gate to Danish mysticism, but at times disappeared itself into a haze of filler and gimmickry – though a few concerts stood strong.
Jeppe Rönnow 18. september 2025
© Victoria Mørck Madsen

No Dying Diva in Paris – but Glitter, Dog Life and Office Humor

Copenhagen Opera Festival 2025 turned away from opera’s classical themes of fate and instead gave space to intimate music-dramatic experiments on queer identity, domestic violence, climate crisis, and mental illness.
Jeppe Rönnow 7. september 2025
© Katarzyna Kmiecik

The Myth Of the Sound City By the Limfjord

Struer Tracks showed that even municipal branding can open new worlds when sound art gets involved – from glitching rat voices in the basement of the music school to subwoofers that shook the harbor.
Jakob Gustav Winckler 27. august 2025
 © Jaa Tämä

Opera’s Darkness Finds a Home in Savonlinna

Savonlinna’s castle festival lets Finnish national opera resonate between stone, lake, and summer night – and shows how dark dramas can mirror the soul of a people.
Jeppe Rönnow 22. august 2025
© Marine Gastineau

Walking Blind

At its best, the ambitious sound art walk »Witness Stand« at Refshaleøen pierces right into Copenhagen’s gentrification of the old industrial area. But does it realise that it is itself part of the problem?
Sune Anderberg 15. august 2025
© Miriam Levi/Borealis

A Festival For Experiments – But Only When It Dares

Borealis in Bergen promises experimental music but falls short when it comes to traditional concert formats. Instead, magic emerges when the audience is invited out into the forest or into floating sound saunas.
Patrick Becker 29. Juli 2025
© Fabian Schellhorn

Between Skin and Noise in Berlin

From digital melancholy and ritual noise assaults to pure silence – MaerzMusik explored the tactile forces of sound and the boundaries of the body.
Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek 10. Juli 2025
 © Carlos H. Juica

Dreams, Noise and Apple Crunch in Stavanger 

The Only Connect festival in Stavanger transformed the city into a landscape of noise, poetry and bodily vibrations.
Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek 30. Juni 2025
Tsujimura Kazuko at Catastrophe Art, 1972. © Photographer unknown

Disappearing Acts: The Resurrection of Tsujimura

Katsuko Tsujimura sought to dissolve the body in postwar Japan. Now, new voices are gently piecing it back together.
Louise Steiwer 29. Juni 2025

Interviews

© CPH:DOX / Katrine Thude

From Darkness to Magic: Warren Ellis and the Journey Toward the Light

After a brutal depression, Warren Ellis returns with renewed strength – and deep gratitude. The 60-year-old Australian multi-instrumentalist opens up about pain, love, animals, creativity, and Nina Simone’s sacred chewing gum.
Peter Albrechtsen 15. Maj 2025
© PR

The Useless Hell

In the musical theater performance »Calls to this number are being diverted« Matthew Grouse puts the absurd working life of late modernity under the microscope.
Henrik Marstal 16. Januar 2024
© Kristof Lemp

Side entrance to the New Music Scene

Slowly the idea of universality is dissolving, experimental music exists everywhere and in every genre – Abbasi, Eizirik and Sanchéz-Chiong in conversation.
Jan Topolski 29. november 2023
© UKRAiNATV

UKRAiNATV – the future starts here

They mix art, activism and technology to create a dialogue across Europe. Meet the internet TV project UKRAiNATV, featured at Unsound 2023.
Giada Dalla Bontà 5. Oktober 2023
© Denys Tsybulko

»We love to talk about solidarity«

The problem is not a lack of interest in Eastern Europe, but in a scarcity of access to its narratives and perspectives, says Ukrainian writer and curator Mariana Berezovska ahead of Unsound Festival 2023.
Giada Dalla Bontà 2. Oktober 2023
© PR

»I love freedom and I know why«

For months Ukrainian born composer and sound artist Katarina Gryvul didn't force herself to write, as she didn't want to associate war with music. It all changed: »An artist cannot be out of politics now«.
Marta Konieczna 1. december 2022
Hania Rani. © Martyna Galla

»I can’t kill anybody with my profession« 

It took Hania Rani many years to acknowledge that she feels much more comfortable in a music other than classical music. However, it lives – like a heavy rucksack – in the Polish artist's piano music, which is allowed to be called poppy. Now she is visiting Copenhagen and the new borderless music festival Resonator in Odense.
Mathias Monrad Møller 3. november 2022
© Malin Annie Jansson

»I would very much like to survive, thanks in advance«

Two years ago, James Black began writing an article series on religion in the Danish composer scene. Getting more and more angry, Black finally had to give up. Why?
Sune Anderberg 27. august 2022
© Tom Ingvardsen

Oil, Opera and the history that haunts us

Niels Rønsholdt's new work, »The Last Rites«, is a pessimistic satire on human nature. The opera takes place in Østerbro Ice Skating Rink, so the audience can feel the cold mechanics of desire and the growing chaos on our planet. Do we really need winter all year round?
Macon Holt 23. august 2022

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Seismograf is supported by
The Danish Arts Foundation, The Danish Composers’ Society/Koda Culture and The Independent Research Fund Denmark.