Jana Winderen is a Norwegian field recordist and musical artist. Many of her pieces utilize hydrophonic recordings, that is recordings produced by a hydrophone, a device that records sounds underwater. For the past ten years, she has been collecting recordings of the glaciers surrounding her home region of Norway, Greenway, and Iceland, in addition to the rivers, oceans, and shores of Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Her music has been described as “sound collages” that incorporate auditory clips gathered from research trips. Treating these clips as improvisational material, Winderen aims to produce an idiom of “sound documents” – ear-opening accounts of human relations with the water around us.

Technology serves an important role in Winderen’s work, revealing “the complexity and strangeness of the unseen world beneath.” She is interested in experimenting with different types of microphones not only to collect new sounds, but also to “give room for broader, more imaginative readings or sounds that are unreachable for the human senses, such as ultrasound.” For example, for an installation piece about ocean stratification, Winderen has recorded with 3-4 hydrophones at different depths simultaneously, capturing differences in features such as pressure and temperature, which “make the sounds move at different speeds.” Fascinated by uncharted territory, Winderen even has a 90 meter long cable – and would eventually like to get wireless equipment to go even deeper. She presents her work through a variety of media, from live environments and installations to “ film, dance, radio, CD, cassette and vinyl productions.”

Winderen’s projects have included Heated (2008), a recording of warming waters “sourced from beneath the oceans surrounding Norway, Greenland, and Iceland,” which has been released as a CD from a live concert in Japan. Winderen has expressed a desire for the piece to have an effect beyond sound, for audiences “to gain respect for the living inhabitants of the oceans and of the vulnerable ecological systems underwater.” The Noisiest Guys on the Planet (2009) is a piece that uses the sounds of snapping shrimp to shift the audience “into a multispecies soundscape to inform (them) about climate change.” 
Winderen has been involved in other creative collaborations, including “Voices from the Deep” with field recordist Chris Watson, which follows the soundscapes surroundings migrating cod as they travel from the Barents Sea to the coast of Norway to spawn. In 2014, Winderen facilitated Dive, “an ambitious 80-channel setting of underwater sounds and deep blue light in a darkened traffic tunnel through the middle of Manhattan.” Most recently Winderen’s 2015 16-channel installation The Wanderer documents the sounds of zooplankton and phytoplankton across the Atlantic Ocean (planktos is the Greek word for wanderer or drifter).

Winderen’s educational background is diverse, spanning across the fields of fine art, mathematics, chemistry, and fish ecology. This speaks to her attitude of the sounds of the sea as not merely a source of romantic inspiration, but an exploratory lab for both artists like herself and humanity as a whole. By “finding and revealing sounds from hidden sources” that are otherwise inaudible or inaccessible to humans, Winderen’s work helps draw awareness and inform us of the effects that climate change has on our oceans and by extension our own lives. Tobias Fischer remarks that “at the end of the day, Winderen is not a scientist but a storyteller.” Ultimately, Winderen aims not only to share with her audiences newly discovered sounds, but to “bring the journey from the actual place, all the physical and emotional experiences.”

To learn more about Jana Winderen, you can visit her website at http://www.janawinderen.com/. Many of her works, including most mentioned above, can be listened to athttps://janawinderen.bandcamp.com/.

Works Cited

1. Helmreich, Stefan. “Underwater music: tuning composition to the sounds of science.” InThe Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.
2. Fischer, Tobias. “Interview with Jana Winderen.” Tokafi.com, Web.http://www.tokafi.com/15questions/interview-jana-winderen/. (Accessed 10 July 2016).
3. Battaglia, Andy. “Jana Winderen: Recording The World.” Red Bull Music Academy Daily, Web. http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2015/07/jana-winderen-feature. (Accessed 10 July 2016).
4. Jana Winderen website, Web. http://www.janawinderen.com/. (Accessed 10 July 2016).