"The Whale Hall in The Natural History Museum in Bergen is a national landmark, so after the recent seven-year renovation, this one exhibit had to appear exactly as it has appeared for the last hundred and forty years. However, it could be transformed with sound. That was the task Lossius, Kvinnsland, and Rothenberg were assigned, first to do two years of research on the various sounds of different whale species: humpback, orca, pilot, beluga, sperm, bowhead, and blue, and figure out how to tell specific stories about the acoustic behavior of these whales entirely in sound, with little explanatory information added. The key research angle was to figure out how sound tells stories to other species besides humans, and how to reflect these stories creatively in a way visitors to the museum could implicitly understand. With twenty-four specially designed whale-bone-colored speakers, it is the most elaborate cetacean sound installation in the world, only made possible by the collaboration of three distinct research approaches: the field recordist (Kvinnsland), the spatial sound specialist (Lossius), and the interspecies musician (Rothenberg). All three will be in attendance at the conference to walk visitors through the whole artistic research process that made this piece possible, enhancing the great conversation between humans and the largest animals that have ever lived on this planet.

It is proposed that the presentation takes place at the Whale Hall in the Natural History Museum, where the artistic research project described is permanently installed. The three researchers will each discuss their part in realizing the sound component of the exhibit, including dialog with curators and the Directorate for Culturale Heritage, aesthetic and compositional choices for sound design and spatialisation, collecting and preparing sound material, and on-site development of the sound scenes. Rothenberg will play a thirty-minute concert live with the whale sounds in the exhibit."