Transcript:
CURWOOD: An exhibition that translates
real-time data from Alaska's changing natural environment into music
recently opened at a museum in Fairbanks. It's the product of an unusual
collaboration between a composer and several scientists. Amy Mayer has
the story.
[MUSIC: Earth and the Great Weather, "The Place
Where You Go To Listen"]
MAYER: Composer John Luther Adams has long
drawn inspiration from the people and land of the North, as in this
track from his CD "Earth and the Great Weather." But in his newest
piece, Alaska literally makes the music.
[AMBIENT SOUND FROM THE PLACE]
MAYER: The Place Where You Go To Listen is a
permanent installation at the University of Alaska Museum of the North
in Fairbanks. The small, irregularly shaped white room is lit primarily
by colored lights that change hue as the sun and moon rise and set. The
sparse setting helps visitors focus on what they're hearing. Adams says
he used a familiar technique to create brand-new results.
ADAMS: Even though this is not a piece of music
in the traditional sense with a beginning, middle and end – it's not
written for human performers playing acoustical instruments – creating
it still involved the process of imaging sounds.
MAYER: Adams selected specific ranges of tone
and frequency to represent different natural phenomena. The "voice" of
the aurora borealis is bell-like. Seismic activity and the location of
the sun and moon are also audibly illustrated. When you enter, the 14
speakers envelope you in sound. Curt Szuberla, a physicist at the
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, is one of Adams' collaborators. He
describes The Place as a virtual electronic instrument made up of bells,
drums and strings.
SZUBERLA: The strings and bells and drumheads
are plucked, bashed and banged based on the geophysical data streams.
And the geophysical data streams, whether they are calculated or actual,
those are the fingers and mallets and bells that hit things and make
things sound, and string plucks, that you hear inside The Place.
MAYER: Szuberla wrote a program that
continuously calculates the positions of the sun and the moon. Here's
what Adams calls the day choir.
[DAY CHOIR SOUND]
MAYER: And when the sun sets, which can be as
early as 3 p.m. in the winter in Fairbanks, the sound changes.
[SUN SET SOUND]
MAYER: Alaska's state seismologist, Roger
Hansen, also collaborated with Adams. Real-time seismic data
continuously flows in from five stations around Fairbanks. Hansen says
geologists have for decades sped up sounds of tectonic movements so
humans could hear them. The low-toned drum sounds Adams developed to
represent earthquakes are more artistic, but you can only hear them if
you visit The Place since the low frequencies won't reproduce over the
radio. Hansen says he enjoys the intersection of music and science.
HANSEN: We have the fidelity of seismic data.
It comes with different frequencies and amplitudes and harmonics – and
those are all the same physics issues that you have in music, you know,
whether it's piano strings or organ pipes.
[AURORA BOREALIS SOUND]
MAYER: Those are the "bells" of the aurora
borealis. Heard inside The Place Where You Go To Listen, they mix with
the other sounds.
[AURORA BOREALIS SOUND]
MAYER: Dirk Lummerzheim, a geophysicist at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks, researches the controversial question of
whether the aurora has sound. He helped Adams find a flow of aurora
information that's available even when the sky is bright and the
northern lights aren't visible from earth.
LUMMERZHEIM: So we were looking for data that
had nothing to do with the light that comes from aurora. We had to find
other things that had to do with aurora, and the one we eventually
settled on is the magnetic field of the Earth.
[MAGNETIC FIELD SOUND]
MAYER: Adams says his collaborators educated
him about science and welcomed him into their areas of research,
answering frequent questions and recalculating formulas for him as he
strived to find the right sonic representations of their data.
ADAMS: At a certain level, it was like... they
were the boys in the band, you know?
[ORGAN SOUNDS]
MAYER: And, Adams adds, their scientific minds
– which proved far more creative than he expected – have changed the way
he thinks about his own work. Years ago, when Adams first began
exploring the creation of a musical landscape based on real scientific
information, he contacted another physicist, John Olsen. Olsen's work
never became a part of the installation, but the relationship between
composer and scientist grew alongside the project. John Luther Adams
says a recent conversation they had ended in a surprising way.
ADAMS: He said, `Oh John, John, just one final
thing.' And he said, `I just wanted to tell you that working with you
has fundamentally changed the way I understand my own data, my own
work.' And I was just floored. To me that was the ultimate compliment
that an artist could receive from a scientist.
MAYER: It likely won't be the last. Adams is
already dreaming of another collaboration with scientists. This one
would be based on weather and could be set up in various places around
the globe.
[MUSIC: John Luther Adams "(unknown)" from 'The
Place Where You Go To Listen' (2006)]
For Living on Earth, I'm Amy Mayer in
Fairbanks, Alaska.
