Merike Laurits, a sound artist who spent nearly a year piecing together casual jobs after graduating from an audio course in Ireland, is releasing a seven-track album built around the sound locals nicknamed the “ghost chord”. She recorded it 14 times near Longyearbyen between February and March, each clip capturing the same wavering three notes.
The album, “North Window”, is due out on 30 October. Laurits, 34, says the sound gave her a project at a time when she was working kitchen shifts and had no paid music commissions; it also brought her an unexpected audience in a town of about 2,500 people.
The sound across the fjord
Residents first reported hearing the chord on still evenings, when wind moved through the old shed’s metal fittings. The notes lasted about eight seconds and carried across the snow-covered ground from the former coal-loading site, where the buildings stand above the road on dark timber supports.
“At first I thought somebody had left a radio on inside,” said Laurits, who made her first recording on a handheld recorder during a walk home. “Then I heard it again in a different place, and I wanted to know what could hold those notes so steadily.”
I thought I had found a voice in the landscape. It turned out to be a piece of metal doing its job badly.
Merike Laurits, sound artist
After her first clips circulated in local chat groups, Laurits asked acoustics consultant Andrej Marić to help identify the source. He compared the recordings with wind readings and inspected the shed with her in April; the pitch rose and fell with gusts, while the three strongest frequencies remained close to 186, 247 and 311 hertz.
Marić found that a loose grille over an air opening vibrated when wind crossed the building at a particular angle. A small change in the grille’s position altered the chord; when a maintenance worker removed it for repair, the sound stopped. “It was not one clean instrument,” Marić said. “The shed was adding its own resonance to the vibration.”
From casual shifts to studio time
The explanation did not end Laurits’s project. She used the recordings as the album’s opening and closing sounds, then built piano and voice parts around them, keeping the pauses and rough edges rather than smoothing the clips into a studio effect.
Her route to the album began in Ireland, where she completed an audio-production diploma in 2023. She said she sent applications for studio and sound-editing work for 11 months, but found only short shifts in cafés and event set-ups before taking a seasonal kitchen job in Longyearbyen.
Daniela Paz, who helps arrange performances at a local arts room, said Laurits’s recordings drew people who had never attended an experimental-music event. “They came to ask what the noise was,” Paz said. “Then they stayed to hear what she had made from it.”
Laurits says the album’s final track includes a fresh recording made after the grille was taken down: the shed is quiet, with only wind and distant footsteps audible. She plans to keep working in the Arctic through the winter, combining paid shifts with sound projects, and says she has not yet decided whether the next one will begin with a mystery.
