The Washington Post reports that vibrations in ice sheets can be recorded and condensed to capture the sound of a melting event. Thus manipulated, one can hear the pattern of melt in the tones day by day, and the shifting pitch is likened to song.
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In semiotic theory, what composes a sign and a signified is subject to your school of thought. Charles Pierce, who developed triadic sign theory, opined that signs are not limited to artificial symbols we consciously create to refer to things outside of the system of language. Rather, that there is no outside to the system of language. “All this universe is perfused with signs, if not composed exclusively of signs,” he proclaimed. He coined the term representamen for the natural object which exists in such a relation to its environment to effectively act as a sign on its environment. “Thus, if a sunflower, in turning towards the sun, becomes by that very act fully capable, without further condition, of reproducing a sunflower which turns in precisely corresponding ways toward the sun, and of doing so with the same reproductive power, the sunflower would become a Representamen of the sun.”
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Semiotics asks us to listen to the environment and find relations and patterns which can aid us in creating a mental reality that reflects or expands on the physical. Art asks us to find the aesthetic in those patterns. Traditionally, the former leads the dance. What’s beautiful and a little stunning is when we require that sense of the aesthetic in order to find the semiotic sense of a thing. We understand that the ice sheet is speaking because it is already mirroring song.