Dogtown

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"A team of 18 sled dogs at the Sisimiut observatory station in Greenland howls in a rising and falling chorus at feeding time. While a human can typically hear high-frequency sounds up to 20,000 Hz, dogs can hear up to 60,000 Hz or above and are highly attuned to pitch differences as small as 1/8 tone. Here the dogs' cries are slowed down and lowered in pitch, revealing melodies that appear to be ultrasonic frequencies not normally audible to the human ear.
"A woman's voice is encoded on a 2.5" micro-floppy disk drive and triggered by a 1980s 12-bit sampler, double-tracked by a metallophone and raised in pitch, glissing upward toward the dogs' high-frequency hearing range. In combination, the hungry dogs' cries and the singing woman's voice each take on some of the other's acoustic morphology. The rising tones of the singing woman cross and merge with the falling pitches of the howling dogs, which are further lowered and slowed down until they produce quasi-linguistic sounding utterances.
"The sled dogs singing for their supper perform a song of astonishing complexity and polyphonic density. Their feeding frenzy is filled with tumbling strains, call-and-response, closely modulated harmonizing and cascading contrapuntal lines. Recorded at the Sisimiut observatory station, Lisa Germany's field recording captures the auditory scene in deep sonic focus, the crackling and whispering static of Arctic wind augmented by an avian flurry of snow buntings."
Human voice sample: Stephanie Marlin-Curiel
Sisimiut dogs field recording by Lisa Germany
Dogs in Sisimiut, Greenland reimagined by Tom Miller.