Music + Coastal Ecology

...8 speakers surrounding the audience corresponds to eight of the research sites...the aggregate sound highlights the cyclical patterns of fresh water and salt water exchange...

Coastal Portrait: Cycles and Thresholds is a work for orchestra and electronics, featuring spatialized electronic sounds derived from the sonification of environmental data gathered by scientists associated with the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long-Term Ecological Research Project. Throughout the piece, there is a dialogue between intuitively composed orchestra music and data-driven electronic sound: synthesized sonic translations of tens of thousands of data points measuring temperature and salinity of waterways, marsh vegetation data, and data (both recorded and projected) relating to sea level rise on the Georgia coast. Conceived in conversations between composer Peter Van Zandt Lane and Marine Scientist Dr. Amanda Spivak, the piece unfolds through musical explorations of the GCE Project’s central focus: long-term patterns of ecological change in Georgia’s coastal estuaries and wetlands. In mapping data collected by dozens of scientists across decades to electronic sounds, a portrait of coastal environments –their natural cycles, how they are responding to global change, and insight into how they may fare in the future– is woven into the musical tapestry. In a sense, the electronics serve as the objective observer, while the orchestra may be heard as a the human interpreter; we hear cycles in the strings echoing the cyclical characteristics of the data (largely repetition with variation), but also moments where thresholds are crossed: a rumination on the points where cyclical ecological patterns give way to unrecoverable change (e.g. the alarming data related to sea level rise).

The use of 8 speakers surrounding the audience corresponds to eight of the research sites throughout the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research domain. Many of the sounds feature synchronized data representing distinct geographical locations. While hearing all 8 data streams can be somewhat chaotic, the aggregate sound highlights the cyclical patterns of fresh water and salt water exchange and local temperatures (while also making outliers more noticeable). Gliding sounds represent average plant heights each year at each site, creating chords that transfer between the orchestra and electronic sounds. The resolution of the piece immerses us in the environments themselves, featuring soundfield recordings sources by the composer near GCE-LTER ecological research sites. This composition (and the associated audio installation, Coastal Cycles II), was supported by a Sea Grant Artists, Writers and Scholars grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the United States Department of Commerce.

Many thanks to data shared by GCE scientists: Amanda Spivak, Daniela Di Iorio, Merryl Alber, and Steven Pennings, and all of their teams of graduate students and research associates, whose funding comes from the National Science Foundation. Sonification was also made possible by data instrument programming by Jared Tubbs.