[Applause]
before we get started today okay just as
a spirit of full disclosure Wow well I
doesn’t really sound like it completely
right now I’m actually a severe
stutterer and and when I’m speaking to
you right now this is very much my
artificial speech that’s the product of
consciously controlling all the words
that come out of my mouth
okay if I don’t use that control if I
kind of turn it off inside of my head it
doesn’t doesn’t take very long before I
would do that every three or four words
prior to learning the control the the
only time I could open my mouth without
doing that okay was when I sang because
because music circumnavigates this
particular disability and and has a
measurable effect on my brain okay and
brains of other strugglers and so so for
me music became very important starting
silence to me as a child but me but and
it isolated me like many disabilities
often do but music gave me a voice and
also gave me a whole bunch of other
voices to sing weather and and that’s
part of the reason why I see these
hidden voices frozen in in the ice at
the bottom of the planet it’s it’s why I
seek sort of new ways of listening so
last year actually just a year ago now I
spent 40 days on
Antarctica I was there with the National
Science Foundation and my job with the
particular science teams I was embedded
with was to learn what they do in to
write music that tells their particular
story okay now many people say that
visiting Antarctica is the closest
anyone can get to visiting another
planet without actually leaving ours
okay and and it very much felt like that
it’s a place of immense beauty the the
the colors the lines the sounds are
gorgeous but but but at the same time
it’s it’s a place that’s not meant for
human beings it’s extremely dangerous
it’s a place of terrible beauty and for
those of us that that spent our time
together isolated on the bottom of the
planet doing good things we had to
listen to each other in new ways to
survive we had to listen to the planet
in new ways to to survive and to into
here these connections that bring us
bring us together
okay the in ways that are separated by
geography and so many other wags well
early in the trip I got to visit at the
top of the mountain where this machine
lives my my friend view he calls it the
lightning machine
it’s actually an ionization detector and
what it does is that it detects every
lightning strike on the planet as it
happens in real time okay and so in the
picture here you can see those lightning
strikes being registered on on the
graphs visually okay
but of course they also had an audio
feed and every lightning strike was like
a pop and so as I was standing there at
any moment of the day it was like
listening to popcorn popping in on my
for life because because one lightning
strike might have been in Rochester the
other one might have been in Bangkok but
I was hearing them right next to each
other the actual sound coming out of the
speaker wasn’t all that nice to listen
to there’s a lot of feedback there that
is in the electronic kind of you know
production of sound but that being said
it was beautiful to listen to the whole
planet sing together there was another
way of looking at the beauty of what I
was listening to not just the raw sound
and I think that that that gets at the
heart of what we do as hearing people is
that our sound a sound environment tells
us where our places it helps us
understand where our place is in any
given moment one of the one of the great
moments here was that was that if you
looked at me and said well you’re a
musician can you hear anything else in
in the audio feed so we spent some time
and I heard a couple things and suddenly
I realized that musical listening was
something that mattered to scientist it
mattered in this isolated outpost at the
bottom of the planet so what is musical
listening anyway okay
we watched musician on the stage maybe
see them doing their thing but musicians
don’t only listen to themselves on the
stage they listen to their relationship
to other musicians they listen they
listen to the the the connection with
the audience they listen to the the
acoustics of the room that they’re in
and the midst of all these layers of
sophisticated listening that a musician
does that there’s this ongoing drama
okay that connects us all between
consonance and dissonance and it’s a
drama that’s measurable by musical
frequencies okay we don’t have to
measure them
right now but he will sing them right
now okay yes yes you have some work to
do here okay okay everybody sing this
note for me sing keep going keep going
keep going because as you sing that out
I can sing this one or this one or this
one all those notes are in consonants
with each other right but of course
there’s other ways in which we interact
with each other
there’s dissonance not only consonants
so sing that note again and I sing you
really want me to chain to okay because
because we we thrive on this connection
with consonance and dissonance that
music is such a great metaphor for and
and so it’s what I found was that being
a musician at the bottom the planet was
was a new way of looking at the way in
which we interact okay with this
beautiful part of the world scientists
and musicians are both professional
listeners we cannot separate them okay
both scientists and musicians use their
skills and their technology to extend
the senses of what we normally use in
everyday life to visit new worlds
whether they’re microworlds or macro
roles and then they come back and they
invite the rest of us into that world
okay and so and so that there’s a lot of
connections between the work of the
scientists and the work of the musician
well inviting you into part of my world
in Antarctica I was
– yes one of those tents was mine okay
we we we lived out there okay for a
couple weeks okay working together with
a science team from UC San Diego the
Ross Ice Shelf is about a kilometer
thick and has the landmass that equals
roughly the size of the country of
France
okay and when you’re out there first of
all there’s no there’s no topography so
there’s no way of knowing which way is
north south east or west in this picture
you can see that the sky actually blends
into the snow so you really don’t even
know what is up and what is down it is
called yesterday camp because to fly
from McMurdo Station you cross the
International Dateline and so you really
don’t know what day that you’re actually
in it and then you combine that with the
fact that it is the Antarctic summer and
the Sun never sets it just as a circle
in the sky so you cannot tell what day
what what time of the day it is whether
it’s in the middle of the afternoon or
the middle of the night and so our
senses are deceived of the normal ways
that we perceive our place in the world
is shattered and so we need some other
ways to find our place the team that I
was working with and put seismographs in
the ice for two years okay
measuring the movement of the ice as if
as it responds to the water underneath
now I said it’s an ice shelf right okay
which means that it’s a kilometer thick
chunk of ice with water underneath that
no land and so because of that what
happens is that is that anything that
happens anywhere else on the planet
reverberates with the Ross Ice Shelf
it’s kind of like okay when I play
guitar if I reach
and I what’s the string of the guitar
there’s a vibration that comes from that
string that vibration translates into
the wooden box of the guitar the
vibrations of the would translate into
the air creates sound waves that travel
to your eardrums your eardrum resonates
sympathetically with that sound and then
translates that information into your
brain for the Ross Ice Shelf what
happens is that if you have a store in
the North Atlantic or you have a tsunami
in Japan the waves that travel through
the water travel all the way to the ice
shelf and it heats it up it sucks it
down it creates waves within it and so
and so the ice shelf is this thing that
resonates with the movement of the rest
of the planet and is very much an
indicator of ongoing ongoing events of
planet change
we can’t down there our feet were on
that ice which meant that even though
our feet could not perceive it we were
still resonating with the rest of the
planet as those infant gravity waves
traveled from everywhere through the
water through the ice through our feet
and into awesome
so what could exactly seismographs a
whole buncha numbers okay
some folks are intimidated by lists of
numbers okay what we said earlier with
the whitening machine the audio feed was
not particularly beautiful but you could
look at it a new way and find the beauty
of connection here very much the same
thing hard to look at lists of numbers
okay and and to feel feel that that sort
of beauty okay
not necessarily something that radiates
beauty well scientists turned those
numbers into pictures that are beautiful
graphs and charts musicians turned those
these lists of numbers into melodies and
harmonies and so this is this is a short
clip of some sonification a mathematical
process of turning these lists of
numbers into into music a new piece of
my fault tremble will clip from it your
melody but in the background you’ll hear
these waves of sana five notes each one
of those notes comes from from a a
number on this on this particular chart
is about the entire
[Music]
so so it’s a brief little glimpse into
into things that that that that we as
listeners have to ask the question okay
our eyes are used to analyzing things we
do that all the time with numbers and
graphs and charts
our ears are built more for
understanding our place in the world
okay understanding our place in the
moment where we happen to be where we’re
listening to sounds around us in the
unfolding world of climate change I
think that that we need our scientists
out there to help us understand the
facts better but we can also invest our
artists and our musicians into reminding
us of how we are connected so to find
those ways in which the the the waves
and the resonance of the planet
resonates with our own life in a world
where everybody talks all the time
we can all listen better and I think
that that that if we if we’ve step
forward we listen more deeply there’s
there’s a chance that that we can find a
new place for us in the world
undo place in an increasingly connected
world thank you so much
[Applause]
before we get started today okay just as
a spirit of full disclosure Wow well I
doesn’t really sound like it completely
right now I’m actually a severe
stutterer and and when I’m speaking to
you right now this is very much my
artificial speech that’s the product of
consciously controlling all the words
that come out of my mouth
okay if I don’t use that control if I
kind of turn it off inside of my head it
doesn’t doesn’t take very long before I
would do that every three or four words
prior to learning the control the the
only time I could open my mouth without
doing that okay was when I sang because
because music circumnavigates this
particular disability and and has a
measurable effect on my brain okay and
brains of other strugglers and so so for
me music became very important starting
silence to me as a child but me but and
it isolated me like many disabilities
often do but music gave me a voice and
also gave me a whole bunch of other
voices to sing weather and and that’s
part of the reason why I see these
hidden voices frozen in in the ice at
the bottom of the planet it’s it’s why I
seek sort of new ways of listening so
last year actually just a year ago now I
spent 40 days on
Antarctica I was there with the National
Science Foundation and my job with the
particular science teams I was embedded
with was to learn what they do in to
write music that tells their particular
story okay now many people say that
visiting Antarctica is the closest
anyone can get to visiting another
planet without actually leaving ours
okay and and it very much felt like that
it’s a place of immense beauty the the
the colors the lines the sounds are
gorgeous but but but at the same time
it’s it’s a place that’s not meant for
human beings it’s extremely dangerous
it’s a place of terrible beauty and for
those of us that that spent our time
together isolated on the bottom of the
planet doing good things we had to
listen to each other in new ways to
survive we had to listen to the planet
in new ways to to survive and to into
here these connections that bring us
bring us together
okay the in ways that are separated by
geography and so many other wags well
early in the trip I got to visit at the
top of the mountain where this machine
lives my my friend view he calls it the
lightning machine
it’s actually an ionization detector and
what it does is that it detects every
lightning strike on the planet as it
happens in real time okay and so in the
picture here you can see those lightning
strikes being registered on on the
graphs visually okay
but of course they also had an audio
feed and every lightning strike was like
a pop and so as I was standing there at
any moment of the day it was like
listening to popcorn popping in on my
for life because because one lightning
strike might have been in Rochester the
other one might have been in Bangkok but
I was hearing them right next to each
other the actual sound coming out of the
speaker wasn’t all that nice to listen
to there’s a lot of feedback there that
is in the electronic kind of you know
production of sound but that being said
it was beautiful to listen to the whole
planet sing together there was another
way of looking at the beauty of what I
was listening to not just the raw sound
and I think that that that gets at the
heart of what we do as hearing people is
that our sound a sound environment tells
us where our places it helps us
understand where our place is in any
given moment one of the one of the great
moments here was that was that if you
looked at me and said well you’re a
musician can you hear anything else in
in the audio feed so we spent some time
and I heard a couple things and suddenly
I realized that musical listening was
something that mattered to scientist it
mattered in this isolated outpost at the
bottom of the planet so what is musical
listening anyway okay
we watched musician on the stage maybe
see them doing their thing but musicians
don’t only listen to themselves on the
stage they listen to their relationship
to other musicians they listen they
listen to the the the connection with
the audience they listen to the the
acoustics of the room that they’re in
and the midst of all these layers of
sophisticated listening that a musician
does that there’s this ongoing drama
okay that connects us all between
consonance and dissonance and it’s a
drama that’s measurable by musical
frequencies okay we don’t have to
measure them
right now but he will sing them right
now okay yes yes you have some work to
do here okay okay everybody sing this
note for me sing keep going keep going
keep going because as you sing that out
I can sing this one or this one or this
one all those notes are in consonants
with each other right but of course
there’s other ways in which we interact
with each other
there’s dissonance not only consonants
so sing that note again and I sing you
really want me to chain to okay because
because we we thrive on this connection
with consonance and dissonance that
music is such a great metaphor for and
and so it’s what I found was that being
a musician at the bottom the planet was
was a new way of looking at the way in
which we interact okay with this
beautiful part of the world scientists
and musicians are both professional
listeners we cannot separate them okay
both scientists and musicians use their
skills and their technology to extend
the senses of what we normally use in
everyday life to visit new worlds
whether they’re microworlds or macro
roles and then they come back and they
invite the rest of us into that world
okay and so and so that there’s a lot of
connections between the work of the
scientists and the work of the musician
well inviting you into part of my world
in Antarctica I was
– yes one of those tents was mine okay
we we we lived out there okay for a
couple weeks okay working together with
a science team from UC San Diego the
Ross Ice Shelf is about a kilometer
thick and has the landmass that equals
roughly the size of the country of
France
okay and when you’re out there first of
all there’s no there’s no topography so
there’s no way of knowing which way is
north south east or west in this picture
you can see that the sky actually blends
into the snow so you really don’t even
know what is up and what is down it is
called yesterday camp because to fly
from McMurdo Station you cross the
International Dateline and so you really
don’t know what day that you’re actually
in it and then you combine that with the
fact that it is the Antarctic summer and
the Sun never sets it just as a circle
in the sky so you cannot tell what day
what what time of the day it is whether
it’s in the middle of the afternoon or
the middle of the night and so our
senses are deceived of the normal ways
that we perceive our place in the world
is shattered and so we need some other
ways to find our place the team that I
was working with and put seismographs in
the ice for two years okay
measuring the movement of the ice as if
as it responds to the water underneath
now I said it’s an ice shelf right okay
which means that it’s a kilometer thick
chunk of ice with water underneath that
no land and so because of that what
happens is that is that anything that
happens anywhere else on the planet
reverberates with the Ross Ice Shelf
it’s kind of like okay when I play
guitar if I reach
and I what’s the string of the guitar
there’s a vibration that comes from that
string that vibration translates into
the wooden box of the guitar the
vibrations of the would translate into
the air creates sound waves that travel
to your eardrums your eardrum resonates
sympathetically with that sound and then
translates that information into your
brain for the Ross Ice Shelf what
happens is that if you have a store in
the North Atlantic or you have a tsunami
in Japan the waves that travel through
the water travel all the way to the ice
shelf and it heats it up it sucks it
down it creates waves within it and so
and so the ice shelf is this thing that
resonates with the movement of the rest
of the planet and is very much an
indicator of ongoing ongoing events of
planet change
we can’t down there our feet were on
that ice which meant that even though
our feet could not perceive it we were
still resonating with the rest of the
planet as those infant gravity waves
traveled from everywhere through the
water through the ice through our feet
and into awesome
so what could exactly seismographs a
whole buncha numbers okay
some folks are intimidated by lists of
numbers okay what we said earlier with
the whitening machine the audio feed was
not particularly beautiful but you could
look at it a new way and find the beauty
of connection here very much the same
thing hard to look at lists of numbers
okay and and to feel feel that that sort
of beauty okay
not necessarily something that radiates
beauty well scientists turned those
numbers into pictures that are beautiful
graphs and charts musicians turned those
these lists of numbers into melodies and
harmonies and so this is this is a short
clip of some sonification a mathematical
process of turning these lists of
numbers into into music a new piece of
my fault tremble will clip from it your
melody but in the background you’ll hear
these waves of sana five notes each one
of those notes comes from from a a
number on this on this particular chart
is about the entire
[Music]
so so it’s a brief little glimpse into
into things that that that that we as
listeners have to ask the question okay
our eyes are used to analyzing things we
do that all the time with numbers and
graphs and charts
our ears are built more for
understanding our place in the world
okay understanding our place in the
moment where we happen to be where we’re
listening to sounds around us in the
unfolding world of climate change I
think that that we need our scientists
out there to help us understand the
facts better but we can also invest our
artists and our musicians into reminding
us of how we are connected so to find
those ways in which the the the waves
and the resonance of the planet
resonates with our own life in a world
where everybody talks all the time
we can all listen better and I think
that that that if we if we’ve step
forward we listen more deeply there’s
there’s a chance that that we can find a
new place for us in the world
undo place in an increasingly connected
world thank you so much
[Applause]
Please follow and like us: