1 week Ago By [email protected] (Yale News)
Composer Matthew Suttor has been thinking about how to create music from the patterns found in the natural world for decades. It’s only been in recent years that he has mastered the art of mapping complex environmental data to musical parameters — thanks in part to the emergence of artificial intelligence. Suttor, who is also a Yale lecturer, has shared his ideas around data sonification this spring in a new course, “Nature, AI and Performance.
” During the semester students have been invited to experiment with translating natural phenomena into performative expressions, using AI and visual programming software (including a program known as Max) at Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media ( CCAM ). After collecting data from the natural world — the movements of chickens in a yard at Yale Farm, climate data from Sacramento, California, information on glacier retraction in the North Cascades — the students have experimented with how it might be reflected musically using AI data-mapping tools. “It’s taking something that’s happening in the real world in, say, three dimensions, and then mapping that to the parameters of music,” said Suttor, program manager at CCAM and a senior lecturer in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“That mapping of really large data sets is something that AI does easily, but human beings aren’t quite so great at.” The course also spawned a parallel project, funded by a Yale Planetary Solutions seed grant, which brought these same concepts into the New Haven public schools in a collaboration with research colleagues, including the Yale School of Public Health’s Judith Lichtman, and Music Haven, an education organization that provides tuition-free classes and mentoring for young people. Other partners included Konrad Kaczmarek, an associate professor in the Yale Department of Music, Diego Ellis Soto ’24 Ph.
D., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jonathan Gewirtzman, a Ph.D.
student at the Yale School of the Environment. The creative outcomes from that project, called “ Listening to Climate Change ,” will be presented at a two-day symposium at CCAM on April 25-26. “It was the most amazing experience,” said Lichtman, the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology, and director of the Humanities, Arts, and Public Health Practice at Yale Initiative ( HAPPY ).
“The students were creating music on the fly, but they were also connecting with each other. They were hearing each other. As somebody who’s in the discipline of public health, it made me realize how much more we could do by engaging with a young audience.
” Students in Matthew Suttor’s “Nature, AI and Performance” class have been invited to experiment with translating natural phenomena into performative expressions, using AI and visual programming software. A marriage of art and data During a recent “Nature, AI and Performance” class session in CCAM ’s Leeds Studio, Keeley Brooks and Nate Strothkamp, Yale College undergraduates who are both violinists, performed a piece composed by Suttor called “No Time to Delay.” The composition is based on data reflecting rising global temperatures since 1880.
At the start of the piece, the students played the strings in the lower register and then incrementally climbed higher in pitch, gradually at first and suddenly sharply higher and somewhat dissonant toward the end. Brooks, a Yale senior majoring in music, became interested in the course after working with a U.S.
Forest Service researcher last summer. “She was studying wildfire acoustics, trying to figure out what sound waves can tell us about how fast fires are moving and what they’re burning,” Brooks said. “That has really influenced how I’ve looked for courses this past year.
” Her own composition for the course is based on data charting streamflow melt from the glaciers in the Cascades Range in Washington. The project required consultation with a researcher who’s been collecting data on the glaciers for more than 40 years. “What’s been really exciting about this class is we’ve not only been thinking about these evolving processes and how we can represent them with art, but actually sonifying the data,” Brooks said.
Powell Munro Holzner, a Yale sophomore who’s interested in evolutionary biology, anthropology, and performance studies, was enthusiastic about taking the course because he loves “trying to communicate the world to people in as many ways as I can.” For his final project, he created a composition for voice, with orchestral backing, inspired by telescopic data charting the positions of planets and asteroids in the solar system. “I was inspired by a lot of Indigenous polyphonic singing traditions, and I’ve been doing archival research to support that,” Holzner said.
Keeley Brooks and Nate Strothkamp, Yale College undergraduates, perform a musical composition that is based on data reflecting rising global temperatures since 1880. Tapping into a new language This spring, Holzner and some of the other students in Suttor’s class also served as volunteers with the Listening to Climate Change initiative. That project came about after Lichtman — an expert on the epidemiology of strokes and heart disease who also teaches a course on humanities, arts, and public health at CCAM — became fascinated with Suttor’s work on data sonification and how it might extend to creatively relaying information about issues of public health, including climate change.
She proposed they write a grant proposal together for an initiative that would engage students in the New Haven public schools. “To tell effective stories about health and communities and environment, you need to engage creative mechanisms,” Lichtman said. “So much of my work has been writing research papers, and they go to my peers and colleagues, but I think to have a very important impact on the community, it’s important to think of other ways to relay information.
” Suttor and Yaira Matyakubova, Music Haven’s artistic director, led interactive sessions with students in the music program. While elementary school-age students engaged in simpler musical exercises (like playing what they thought a bird might sound like on their instruments), middle school and high school students created compositions inspired by environmental data, including bird flocking patterns and shifting ecosystems, using specialized software developed with support from the YPS Seed Grant. “What took me by surprise, and also everyone around me, was how extraordinarily empowering it was for them,” Suttor said.
“Often, we underestimate what children understand. They do understand what’s going on and they have language for it and they can tell stories about it.” Their compositions will be performed by Music Haven’s professional string quartet during a concert on Friday, April 25, as part of the symposium.
Also that evening, students from Suttor’s course will present their compositions and other creative performances. The concert will be followed by a moderated conversation about the integration of music, environmental science, and climate advocacy. Participants will be Vivek Hari Sridhar, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany; Soto, the former Yale graduate student who is now a David H.
Smith Conservation Research Fellow and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley; Shubhi Sharma, a Ph.D. candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale; Aran Mooney, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Nadege Aoki, a Ph.
D. candidate studying biological oceanography in the MIT -Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program . The symposium will continue on Saturday morning with a workshop exploring interdisciplinary methods of climate education, advocacy, and engagement.
Suttor hopes the event marks just the beginning of a broader effort to combine environmental science with music creation, photography, theater, or performance. “You can show bar graphs and pie charts forever, but that you can play a piece of music and go straight to people’s emotions and intellects is particularly powerful as an educational model,” he said. “I think there’s tremendous potential.
And that’s what we want to investigate going forward.” Media Contact Topics Environment What does the future hold for our national forests? Yale-related nonprofit wins global carbon removal prize Yale scientists find two new fish species in Alabama streams — and they’re already imperiled Large-scale study in India shows that a pollution market can reduce emissions Night shift.
