The surprise in this Alaska clip is not a distant mountain or an animal appearing from the trees. It is the sound. Cory Williams reacts to an icy surface that seems to have borrowed its soundtrack from a science-fiction film.
Give the recording your attention
The original upload on LiveEachDay belongs to Williams’ Living in Alaska series. Listen to the changing pitch and the space between the initial impact and what follows. Those details are more interesting than treating the noise as something supernatural.
A recording captures sound at a particular microphone position. It does not provide measurements of the lake’s ice thickness, temperature or strength, and the appearance of the surface cannot fill in those missing measurements.
Enjoy the observation without copying the experiment
There is no need to throw objects onto a frozen lake to appreciate the clip. Compare its audible surprise with the visual patterns in NASA’s Lake Puma Yumco photograph. For another familiar surface behaving unexpectedly, look at footprints left standing above wind-eroded snow.
Sound turns the setting into the subject
The earlier account placed Cory Williams and his girlfriend beside a frozen lake in Anchorage. What makes the recording memorable is the contrast between the familiar action at the surface and the unexpected sound that follows. The reaction helps communicate the surprise, but the lake itself supplies the subject.
Listen once for the initial impact and again for the sound’s changing character afterwards. Those are separate parts of the experience. A microphone records them from one position, so the clip is best enjoyed as an observation rather than treated as an acoustic test of the entire lake or a guide to whether its ice will support a person.
Sources, photography and further reading
Original feature and image attributions:
- DudeLikeHELLA
- Life Buzz
- The Coolest Music in the World: Listen to Siberian Ice Drummers Use Frozen Lake Baikal as an Incredible Musical Instrument
- You Will Not Believe How These Russians Get This Car Out Of A Frozen Lake
- How to Recover a Semi-Truck From a Frozen Lake
- Two Guys Rescue Deer From Frozen Lake
- original upload on LiveEachDay
- NASA’s Lake Puma Yumco photograph
- footprints left standing above wind-eroded snow
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