Michael Livermore 0:11
Welcome to the free range podcast. I’m your host Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the Program on Law Communities and the Environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Matthew Burtner, a professor of compositions and Computer Technologies in the music department at UVA. His work explores ecology and the aesthetic link between human expression and environmental systems. His new album “Icefield” was recently released by Ravello records. Matthew, thanks for joining me today.
Matthew Burtner 0:40
Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on your show.
Michael Livermore 0:43
So in the in the publicity materials for “Icefield”, I saw this question and struck me as an interesting point of departure. The question was, if glaciers could speak, what would they tell us? And I guess my, my question for you is, do you see your compositions or the compositions on this particular collection of works anyway, as playing this kind of translational role between humans in the natural and the natural world?
Matthew Burtner 1:10
Well, I think that the music in that it embeds systems of change from the natural world as musical forms, I think that it challenges listeners to think outside of our conventional ways of understanding music. That’s my, that’s part of my, my, my hope, with this kind of work, because I feel like part of our challenge as, as humans is to, to really consider the the other inhabitants of this world as, you know, as valuable as living as even sentient. And so I’ve, I’ve extended that past the other animals and, and even plants and start imagining, you know, if the river has a kind of sentience or being, you know, what does it what is it thinking if there’s the glacier have a kind of, is it an earth animal in some sense. And so the music is really trying to dissenter, humans in order to understand these other type sort of complex systems that make up our environment
Michael Livermore 2:30
Yeah it’s really interesting is so on the title track, just to give an example, the it’s just kind of haunting, beautiful composition. And my understanding, again, just looking at some of the notes, is that the way that was constructed was, you went out into the middle of this huge field of ice, basically,I mean hygge being like, you know, 1000 square miles. So really big with the saxophone and some, and some recording equipment, microphones and the like. So let’s, let’s give that a listen.
So, how do you create this? This comp is this composition, just from a physical perspective. What we’re hearing is, is includes sounds from the National Environment, wind and that kind of thing you could imagine, but also the saxophone itself. How is that just kind of as a practical matter? How do you how do you make that happen?
Matthew Burtner 4:17
Well, yeah, it’s, it’s super interesting, just as a practical matter, because, you know, in this work, I’m really imagining the ice field itself, which is the headwater for hundreds of glaciers in the region. So it’s a kind of proto glacier’s system. I’m imagining that as a musical instrument. And so I brought the bass saxophone out because it’s like the biggest saxophone that I have. The next one is the instrument that I that I play so it’s like, you know, I wanted to bring my best to the to the best thing I could bring. And so I took the bass out. And you know, the bass saxophone is this little tiny speck of gold out in the middle of this vast system of of ice And then I put microphones in the saxophone, but also inside the ice field. So I dug down, put microphones down in the snow, put them, you know, around near the instrument, but also far away from the instruments. So you would pick up the environment, and then made this multi channel recording where we are hearing the saxophone played, you know, as an acoustic instrument, but we’re also listening to the saxophone filtered through the icefield itself, so that the snow, you know, the sound of my playing is going is resonating down through the snow and being picked up by the microphones down there. And then that’s, you know, providing a kind of filter to the saxophone sound. And then the wind is in there and the sounds of the snow itself. I played the snow. So I move my hands around on it and recorded that all that’s in this, this piece. And it’s really trying to create this kind of, I mean, there’s a couple of ways of thinking about it, I guess it’d be one would be a duet between the sax and the and the icefield. But the other is maybe a kind of hybrid human nature, instrument that’s like a kind of collaboration between this massive environmental system and this massive quote, instrument. If you watch the video on on YouTube, there’s a music video for this for this track, and it’s basically a real time film of me playing that out there. So you can kind of get a sense of what we’re talking about.
Michael Livermore 6:37
Yeah. And the scales, the scales, really the, the juxtaposition of scales is, is is really fun there because right the bass sax is huge. But not compared to 2000 miles square.
Matthew Burtner 6:52
Yeah, so I took I got I hired a pilot to fly me out there with the bass sax, and it’s used as a kind of ski plane so they can land on that on that ice field. And the bass sax and I, and my recording equipments, pretty much all that could fit in that plane. And they dropped me off. And they said, Well, you know, they had, I had to have survival gear for several days, because the weather conditions are such that they might not, they don’t know when they can come get you. So you have to be ready to stay out there. So I had to decouple everything from the snow because it’s so cold, and the sun’s just beating down. So I had to have everything also protected from overheating and just from the sun itself. So it’s a really weird kind of working environment. Really interesting place to work. And of course, I you know, the batteries are, are dying. So you have to have power. So I’m using a solar I have a solar charging system. And then I had to arrange it all because I was shooting it as a, I was recording and recording a video everything had to be kind of positioned so that it didn’t, you know, look messy, or obstruct the idea of the piece or make sound itself in the environment. So it was really it was fascinating project. It’s definitely one of the one of the coolest projects I’ve ever been involved in. Yeah, so much fun.
Michael Livermore 8:11
And then when you when you were out there, this is a man just kind of more of a process question. But again, just interested was, is the balance between improvisation on the spot and kind of composition that you had done ahead of time? Because it seems like I can imagine kind of going both ways into something like that. Yeah, so So was this a piece of you largely composed ahead of time entirely ahead of time? Or was there improvisation that was happening as well in that environment?
Matthew Burtner 8:41
Definitely improvisation because I did compose a lot before and also prepare a lot before I wrote melodies and certain kinds of materials and played the saxophone imagining what I might do out there. And then I prepared by by planning both the kind of practical survival necessities but then also the microphone and you know how that was going to work. And so I went into it with this, this idea, but also not knowing it, really at all what was going to happen, because it’s like super unpredictable, right? It could be the weather is first of all, it’s just it’s just very unpredictable. Like I this was my third attempt, I got dropped off on the third attempt. The first the first times the flights were canceled because of weather. And, and it was a good thing too, because they got like, like five feet of snow. So imagine being out there and like five feet of snow on top of you. I mean, it’s really like very dangerous but but when I went it was beautiful weather and so I had prepared all this and then I got there and it was just kind of like Okay, now it’s time to start and the first thing I did was make coffee. You know that’s like a good place to start.
Michael Livermore 9:56
Warm up, the old lungs a little bit, yeah
Matthew Burtner 10:01
and then just started, like, trudging around planning out the session and like working on it. And I had my materials. So I, I tried to, I started with those elements and then improvised with the icefield. itself and, and recorded, recorded recorded. And then I took all that material back to the studio. And, and then come I think composed the piece by edits. So I, I’d edit what I did take out a good part, find a part of the icefield sound that was really interesting and layer that and so there’s, there’s layers in the recording, it’s not like a single take real time recording, it’s a creative mixing of of a real time recording session. Right, wow. So there’s a lot of improvisation. And it’s, you know, that’s like, in general, I think of it as like, an approach to the natural world, because, you know, in composition and in human music, we often try to try to fix things like, like, fix them in in frequency. So we want to be able to play a C on the instrument needs to sound like a C every time. And then D needs to be tuned perfectly, you know, a major second above that. But in the environment, it doesn’t follow our, our interest in sound, there are different properties, different organizational systems of sound in the environment. And so part of this whole endeavor, with environmental music is discovering what those systems are, and learning to appreciate the beauty of what they are already not necessarily can try to make it conform to what we think of as beautiful music.
Michael Livermore 11:50
Yes, that’s really, really cool and interesting, interesting stuff. I mean, one question that just kind of comes out of that, for me is you know, when I think of playing music, you’re you’re authentic people can play music by themselves, but you’re also playing with other people in a in a group of some kind, you think of improvisation, canonically jazz improvisation where people are kind of riffing off of each other. And so I guess one question for you is when you’re out there in that in that environment, and especially your your, it’s a challenging environment, you’re doing improvisation in that way you’re improvising with, with the physical materials, and you’re set up and it’s all kind of spontaneous. And in the moment, how much of that once you actually get into playing and you’re kind of in the in the flow of playing along. But you’re responding to what’s happening in the in the environment? To what degree does that feel like just that just the physicality of it? Or the kind of just musically does it feel similar to when you’re playing with other people where, you know, they’re changing, you know, they’re making changes, especially again, in improv kind of situation, and you’re responding and they’re responding? Does it have that same kind of feel to it, when you’re, say, in this situation where you were by yourself, but you’re interacting with this whole, you know, complex environment?
Matthew Burtner 13:14
Well, I would say that it does not, it does not feel like that at all. Pretty much because the natural world doesn’t care about us. You know, it doesn’t, it’s not responding to us it doesn’t, it’s not even speaking. I mean, we’re so far from speaking the same language of the natural world, that we certainly can’t play music, with the systems yet in a way that they could respond that has to that has to be earned. That’s like something you know, even improvisers who play together, human improvisers are, are studying that kind of human human interaction. So to translate that into, you know, into human environment interaction, that’s a that’s a far leap. For example, what what what I feel what I think feels the most alien in improvising with the natural world is the is the sense of temporality. Because there’s like, you know, this ice field or the forest or in or a river or the ocean, no matter what system it is. These places have vast senses of temporality. And we’re kind of fixated on the might the meso level, you know, three second events and 10 second melodies and maybe a piece lasts five to 10 minutes. Well, the environments not like mean yeah, there’s stuff happening on that level, but the the grant cycles of the place and the systems of change can far exceed that and so you know, it if the icefield is interested in playing with me, it’s going to you know, I’m just a blip, I’m gonna say a small blip in the image scale of temporality like a, like a glitch in, in the electro acoustic system, it’s like a clip or something that happens. That’s my whole experience, it’s just a little clip inside the, the icefield. So that’s really weird. Because you’re playing, you know, and you put all this energy into your instrument, your blowing, you play your best melody that you’ve, you’ve composed, and you play it, and you expand it, and you do all this stuff. And that’s, you know, you think you’ve done a good job, and then you just stop, and there’s just like, the Icefields still, they’re still persisting, you know, doing what I was doing before you started, you’re like, Okay, so what can I do here? You know, this is, and that’s i So, so part of it is, is, I mean, there’s two things that can happen, you could turn away from it, you could say, okay, the icefield is not sentient, it does not care. It does not listen to me, there’s no kind of interaction here. I’m not part of it. But then another another thing, another way to do is like, Well, I’m not, I’m not yet, I haven’t discovered the mode of communication yet. I need to play more with it, I need to get used to this feeling of, of vast temporality. And like, you know, just, even if I can’t understand it, I have to kind of familiarize myself with that feeling that like, I can just stop in the middle of a phrase, get up, walk over, drink some coffee, go back, the icefield doesn’t care and then pick up where I left off. And that was like, Okay, that would not really work in a jazz, you know, context, right? If you, if one of the musicians just kind of stopped playing, got up, walked away, came back, like 15 minutes later, or the song would be over, it’s over the Icefields not over, it’s like, in a different scale of time. I don’t know, that’s, that’s kind of a strange way to think but but I’m, I’m really committed to understanding the temporality and the resonance of these natural systems, as forms of aesthetics that we can engage with, partly as a way of decentering ourselves as a kind of politics of decentering. The, the human will, as the only thing that we are focused on, I think that music can can teach us about, you know, how to appreciate the these systems in the natural world, even very strange ones, like the icefield.
Michael Livermore 17:29
Yeah, well, and so I mean, one of the, just, as we’re talking about timescales, one of the, this puts me in mind of some, some of your other work that, that have come across where you’re doing something different with timescales. So I’m talking about is where you where you take data from, that you collect, or that is collected from the environment, and then you translate that data into into sounds basically, right, as a way of, and that in a way that is also working with different timescales, because you’re taking a process, you know, like sea, sea ice extent, or something like that, that we could sit, we could collect data on. And that’s happening over very long timescales. And in a way, that’s the planet talking to us in its own timescale language. But it’s hard for us to see that or it’s hard for us to understand that, that language at that time scales and so your, your translate, translating that into a different timescale that maybe is a little bit more comprehensible for human being.
Matthew Burtner 18:34
Right, so yeah, this is to have the benefits of sonification. One is being able to listen to things that we can’t otherwise listen to, like listen to data, that doesn’t itself make sound. So like, you know, the, the waves on the beach, make sound and we can record them. And we can use that sound file to understand the energy of the of the movement of the water, but the light that’s reflecting off the waves doesn’t make sound. And we can’t, we can’t hear that. But with sonification, we can take some sort of light data and turn it into sound so that we could couple that with the sound of the waves, we could couple a computer sonification of the light on the waves and have a different understanding of that system through sound. That’s one of the interesting things about sonification. The other is that, that it does allow us to transpose the temporality to take something that’s like 40 years of data and bring it down to the level of a you know, of a phrase, a musical phrase or a musical movement. And so, you know, you can hear these changes that are obviously outside of the realm of our perception except over like a lifespan, but they could easily exceed our lifespans. And you could listen to them in a minute or two. and get a sense of what’s happening. So that is a really wonderful thing about about sonification. And I have done this with like, the word ice prints that’s on the ice field album uses ice extent data from the Arctic mapped into piano music. And then there’s another piece on there, called sonification, of an Arctic lagoon that takes different layers of data and creates musical instruments and plays that out over a full year. So you in in the five minutes of the piece, well, it’s four minutes, actually, the four minutes of the piece, you hear one year of data mapped into that musical form. And it’s, it’s dramatic, it’s, it’s amazing and four minutes. It’s so it’s so dynamic, this environment in the Arctic, where things are frozen all winter, and then they just explode with productivity in the summer months, and then they freeze again, and it’s just this incredibly dynamic environment. And the sonification lets us hear that as a musical form.
Michael Livermore 21:07
Great, well, maybe this would be a nice time that we could hear a little bit of a sonification that you put together either either one from ice field or from another context.
Matthew Burtner 21:20
Yeah, let’s listen to a little bit of the sonification of an Arctic lagoon, and let’s listen to perhaps like the late winter months in the Arctic, this would be like March starting in about March, and then through the summer months, and you can hear that great explosion of harmonic spectral energy as the summer comes to comes into comes into sounding Great.
Unknown Speaker 23:19
Begin with
Michael Livermore 23:27
so that’s really, really interesting. And one of the things that this puts me just in mind of is, is the use of record recording instruments and electronics and computers and how that that’s different from, you know, kind of the old days, we would, we would use, you know, more classical instruments, just standard instruments. And I guess what I’m thinking here is, in at least some music in the past, you have, I think, some attempts to portray, like, the changing seasons, or, you know, like, that’s kind of in the background, that there’s something about the natural environment that has like, inspired a musical composition. But here, you’re actually taking like data that’s collected about the world and translate that translating that into, like, directly translating that, rather than kind of being inspired by that. And I wonder if that’s an interesting, worthwhile distinction, just kind of almost in the with the history of music or the history of western music?
Matthew Burtner 24:34
Yeah, I think that’s right. There’s a there’s a lot of music that involves a kind of impression of the natural world and I think, certainly for as long as people have been making music, they’ve been making music about the natural world. So in many ways, like this eco acoustic approach is perfectly in line with what people have been doing since musicians have been doing forever. On the other hand, And there’s some new dimensions to it. Because specifically, because the tools that we have are are different, you know, the computer, the personal computer, that allows you to apply sophisticated computation on to data and run things at us at a sample rate level, so that you can turn that data into sound. That’s a very recent development relatively in music, you know, we can, we can conjecture that, you know, if Debussy had had access to this kind of technology, or Mendelssohn or, you know, old, you know, anyone of the, of the musicians of any different tradition that was inspired by the natural world, that they might have used this as well, and the music might have taken on different different forms. I think the one of the thing that excites me about the the sonification, and the more than impression impressionism is that it doesn’t the sonification the data doesn’t always sound like you want it to sound. And this is like a big, you know, problem with it. It’s like, the, you turn the data into sound, and it’s like, well, that’s kind of ugly. That’s kind of malformed to like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it’s not satisfying, it’s like, why is it? So? Why is it? Doesn’t it change very much? Like, why is it just? Or why is it going down when it should be going, and I feel like it should be going up? Well, that’s because it’s the data, like, that’s the way the world is working, you know, so you can I mean, then you have a choice, it’s like, you can either change the sound like change the data, but then you’re not really representing the system anymore, you’ve moved into that impressionistic approach, or you can like, listen to it and try to, you know, understand it for what it is, and maybe find beauty in that or learn about the beauty that’s in there. That’s the part that really excites me about the sonification. I mean, I can tell you that for every one successful sonification, like, I think that arctic lagoon sonification successful for every one of those, there’s probably 30 that are not successful as as music. And you know, so you listen to them, you learn about them, and then you have a choice, you can like, well either just throw them away, or maybe you can use them in a way that’s not like in the foreground. So I’ve used for example, annual cycles of thawing and refreezing these kinds of oscillations of of, of warming on an annual cycle, I’ve used that as beats. So I’ve taken that, that that that year long cycle, and compressed it down to like, 200 milliseconds, so that it just goes boop. But that little book contains a whole year of data. So where it wasn’t very interesting to listen to the year kind of cycle, I found it quite exciting that there was a beat in the music that was like, bloke that represented the, you know, the, the actual data from the natural world. So at that point, you know, there’s no listener that’s going to hear that and say, Oh, I think that sounds like 1986, like the following. But but but that’s okay. Because this is also conceptual art, like, it’s okay, that you can’t hear everything that’s in music. It’s about what’s there and about your mind, like being excited about what’s there as much as it is about like, the actual, the actual notes that are there.
Michael Livermore 28:48
Yeah. So that’s a whole fascinating line to explore to is, and maybe we could get back to, because I really do think that’s a kind of a fascinating element of a lot of your work is that the kind of conceptual piece of it, that really matters. But one thing that I thought we just want to get on the table, too, is strikes me and this is probably an incomplete. So let’s add to it appropriate that there are kind of a couple of different ways that your music incorporates this interaction with the with the natural world. So there’s the sonification, that we were kind of describing right, where you have basically data that’s been collected through some kind of data collection, measurement kind of instrument that you can then translate over into sound basically. And that’s, that’s the sonification then there are using the natural world, or some part of the natural world as an instrument, right. And that’s what we were kind of talking about, with icefield, where you’re playing the saxophone, but you’re also, you know, swishing around the snow and the saxophones being played through the ice And so though, the world kind of becomes this instrument that you’re interacting with, to create sounds, and then there’s a, again, kind of correct, correct me if I’m wrong here, this seems like a third category as well, which is kind of directly kind of pass a sentence some sort of quote unquote, passively recording sounds that are happening in the natural world without necessarily your intervention. And then using those kinds of sounds, in compositions and so on, is that, is that also part of your work as well?
Matthew Burtner 30:29
Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve basically done about as good a job as like I’ve ever done in describing like, eco acoustics methods, when I talk about it, I talk about those three approaches. And when I teach eco acoustic music, I teach those three approaches, we learn each one of those things is like a kind of field of study and, and you can make pieces that are, so to recast them into the music, language, I call it we call the recording the natural world soundscape or field recording. And that’s, you know, it’s a creative action, because you have to choose where to put the microphones and what microphones to use and all that. But it’s, you know, the idea is that you’re recording some phenomena that’s happening, and then listening to it and understanding it and using it kind of as is. And then and then the sonification, which you described beautifully. And then And then the third would be the human nature interaction, which involves that kind of performance and performative element of interacting with these systems, you know, which can be so wonderful as musical instruments to bring the sensitivity of a musician who spent, you know, imagine like a violinist spends 10 hours a day practicing for years and years and years, and has this kind of amazing, amazing year hand coordination with this with this machine, the violin, to bring that level, that sophisticated training to the snow. I mean, it’s like, you know, the snow isn’t the music instrument set of the violin, there’s so much in or the water or the sand, whatever it is, you know, there’s like a, as much detail and sensitivity in that environmental material as there is in the violin, we just don’t tend to think about it as an expressive instrument. But so so those three things definitely are all at play and to varying degrees in any composition.
Michael Livermore 32:37
Yeah. And, you know, it’s interesting, as you as you were kind of talking about the last category, the using, are interacting with the natural world in such a way as to in this kind of instrument way, right, as you know, you gotta figure that that those were the earliest musical instruments was, you know, kind of simple drums and flutes that you could kind of that maybe were just already someone found, or that required a very little amount of manipulation to create. So in a sense, that’s, it’s very interesting, because that approach is very, presumably has a very long history, even if it’s been a little last for the last couple 100 years, at least in the West, whereas something like sonification, or recordings, those really rely on advanced technologies that we’ve only had in the case of recording, I don’t know, 200 years or so 150 years. And then sonification is using data analytic techniques that are decades old.
Matthew Burtner 33:40
Great, absolutely. That’s such a good point. That’s not something that I’ve really, you know, articulated like that, I love that idea that there’s that one of these, these three things are not the same. There’s one that’s actually very, very fundamental. Because you’re, you’re totally right, of course, it’s about the human body, and generating sound with, you know, external resonant sources. So, like, you can sing, you can move your hands and you can touch things and you can dance and you know, and that’s our first that’s our first music for sure. Then you pick up a stick, you pick up a rock, that becomes like another tool, and then it just goes from there. But absolutely, that’s, that’s as old as music, and then these other things. I mean, we might be able to with our, you know, with our academic sensibilities to discover a history of sonification that predates computation in the, in the sense of computers that we think of now, like, you know, there are ways that data was mapped into sound before the computer, actual data. It was done, you know, By, by with, you know, hand by hand computing. And there’s probably notions of recording that predate the, the field recorder, which was a, you know, invented from in World War Two and came into use in the late 50s when the, when the Nazi Germans left Paris and left their field recorders and was taken up by artists and used to make art. But, you know, before that you have messi in, in the forest with his music paper, listening to birds and transcribing them in real time on the paper, you know, so messy in was a guy with his amazing ear was a kind of recorder himself. You know, so we could probably keep going and find examples of that. But But, but absolutely. There’s one of those three approaches that’s, you know, really, really fundamental to music. Ironically, it’s the one that’s probably the least recognized in my field. So we often there, there are lots of, there’s lots of discussion of sonification there’s lots of discussion of soundscape and field recording, but there’s very little research and discussion into human nature interaction and that kind of performance of natural materials, relatively, to those other two.
Michael Livermore 36:23
Yeah, that’s really, really interesting. And there’s, it seems that, you know, just thinking about a violin, right, there’s an there’s a whole history of those types of instruments, then, you know, at some point, it just kind of flows back into something that was you know, people walking around and, and just engaging with, with things that they found in that in the natural world. Now, thinking about the soundscape field recording, you spent a lot of time out in, in, in nature doing these types of field recordings. Do you? Do you have any? Wondering if we can hear perhaps some some examples? If you have any, any favorites that you think, tell? Kind of a particular interesting story or evocative of a particular place?
Matthew Burtner 37:09
Oh, yeah, that’s interesting. Yes, of course. I mean, every, every, every recording, of course, is telling that story. But um, let me play. Alright, so I have three just come to mind right now. But let me focus on on on just one because it’s so unusual and so marvelous. When I visited, Guatemala, and there was an erupting volcano, and Guatemala and, and so I hired some guides to take me up the mountain mkhaya, where this, this volcanoes erupting. And these people live in the shadow of this volcano, so they they understand how to navigate the lava flow safely. Whereas, of course, I didn’t. And they took me the guides took me up there to record the sounds of the lava coming out of the earth. And this was such an amazing system because you’ve got the force of the lava coming, pushing out of the volcano and then quickly cooling at the surface. When it hits the hits the air, it cools on the surface of the lava, but it stays molten underneath. And so as these kinds of crests form on the surface, they’re breaking off as the lava like breaks, cracks, its own forming skin, and they fall down and they make this kind of clicking, tinkling, breaking, like shattering sound, but it happens in a way that’s perpetual. It’s like, it’s like glass breaking perpetually. So I mean, that’s that’s one that I think is really incredible. We can listen to that.
Michael Livermore 38:55
Great That sounds wonderful. Let’s let’s give that a listen
Matthew Burtner 39:23
another one is another one is the, on the Virginia coast. You have these little crabs that that create tunnels in the mud banks and they these are their little homes, they call them flutes. And when we’re out there on those mud flats, I love to like put the average little tiny microphones and I’ll thread them down inside the the crab flute into its little hole sort of home and just kind of eavesdrop on the domestic life of a a crab in the mud. And it’s so beautiful because this the flute, actually the crab flute actually is a, it’s a closed tube. So it has a resonant characteristic that’s unique for that crab. So the crab made this flute, this, this hole, the hole, then the wind blows across the surface of it, the sounds from the outside world filter down into the two, and it resonates at a particular frequency. So this these crab flutes are actually kind of flutes like musical instrument, flutes, they, they have a pitch. And so like down inside this hole, you hear the whole world filtered through the crabs, ambient resonant home, and then you hear the movement of the of the crab, as it kind of probably wonders, what the heck is this microphone down here? I gotta get this thing out of here, you know. So that’s also a really interesting recording. And I can play that for
Michael Livermore 41:01
you too. Yeah, wonderful. Let’s, let’s give that a listen.
I love that it’s called the Crab flutes. So that’s, that’s like the you didn’t you didn’t come up with a you don’t call that the flute. That’s what the kind of the scientists or folks in the air that call it?
Matthew Burtner 42:03
That’s right. That’s right. And they’re all different. So if you move the mic over to another one, it has a different pitch a different sound. And it’s just and then the mud banks are just absolutely packed with these things like, like 1000s of them. And there’s just crabs everywhere. And so if you, you know, this is like a giant orchestra of flutes.
Michael Livermore 42:25
And you can actually hear it like if you’re standing there, you’ll hear the sound Wow, that’s really something else
Matthew Burtner 42:29
No, no you can’t hear it, you can’t hear it off the surface, you have to like, you have to really amplify it turn, you know, go in close, it’s like a microscope, you know, you have to like zoom in. And and then you can hear that resonance. But if you’re just standing on the mud banks, of course you don’t, you don’t hear the world of the crab. So this, again, is like about kind of transposing our listening out of our out of our human centered perception into, you know, the way a crab might might hear the world. So it’s a kind of, I mean, there’s definitely like a posthumanism that runs through all of this environmental listening and extends beyond animals, animal hearing and animal localization to plants, but also to, you know, things like the forest and the glaciers.
Michael Livermore 43:22
Yes, you know, it’s one of the things I it’s just such an incredible feature of our world, that when this magnification point read like that you could take something like an insect, right? That’s very small, or something you couldn’t even perceive, you know, on, you know, a bacteria or something that’s happening in a very small, small scale. And and when you magnify it, it’s just this like, beautiful thing. And there’s this, just the world is full of these things like that. We’re just at the wrong scale to perceive that it just nevertheless exists out there. And that now we have some some tools that allow us to peer into these different scales, like looking at the planet for that matter from outer space is not something that you could ever do without a tremendous amount of technology. But it’s this beautiful thing that’s just kind of sitting there waiting. I don’t know if it’s waiting for us exactly. But it’s, it’s there, and we can see it and we can experience it.
Matthew Burtner 44:22
Totally, ya know, so much of this. The joy of this kind of environmental music is participatory, it’s about being able to actually listen yourself, you know, so the microphone and the headphones allow you to kind of augment your morality so that you can now perceive things you couldn’t before perceive. And those things are wonderful. And that’s that participatory aspect of it is really, it never stops being surprising, and I constantly underestimate how powerful that is. It It’s steady. You know, when I keep when I’m teaching equal acoustics, the first time that the students put on their, their headphones, and they have their field recorders, and they start going around listening to things. It’s just It’s the best day of, of the semester, because they’ve just, they’ve, they’re lost. I mean, I’ve lost the class, like, as soon as they put on their headphones, they’re gone. Like, it’s so interesting. And so consuming that, you know, I always underestimate how interesting it is. So I’ll be like, Okay, everybody time to regroup. And that wasn’t nearly long enough, like, I didn’t give them like nearly long enough to listen, because it’s so fascinating. And then that just becomes like, part of the way they hear. And I think of that as part of like, expanding our, our understanding of the world. And really thinking outside thinking that there’s there are things that we don’t perceive, there’s, you know, our phenomenology is limited, and, and that’s good to know. But also, it’s okay. It’s okay. There’s many things that we don’t, that we don’t know about the world, but we just, it just sort of reminds us that we have to be extra conscientious, you know, and careful and respectful and appreciative.
Michael Livermore 46:22
of all this, yes, it’s really, it’s really something. Well, one question I have for you, as we, as we’ve been talking this over is, is kind of like the aesthetics theory of some of the stuff or maybe even kind of how this has influenced your own way of thinking about aesthetics or appreciating beauty or, or, or music more generally, so I can think of. So on the one hand, you’re, you know, obviously highly trained musician, you’re a professor in the music department. And, and as you were mentioning, with respect to the, you know, the violin as she was playing that, you know, with some a different kind of instrument in the natural world, there’s, there’s this, this, there’s value, or this is the question I sent is the kind of the value of learning and sophistication that’s happening in a particular intellectual cultural tradition. But then that trains us to hear certain things or to listen for certain things in a particular way, right? Like, we like just even operating within a specific scale. And if something’s off the scale, it sounds off, or we have certain expectations around what music is going to look like, or, you know, this, you know, we’re going to return back to these themes or whatever else, right, there’s just kind of certain structures that we’ve been trained to listen for. And so there’s this kind of tradition. And then when you’re, you know, in the context of the sonification, or, you know, when you’re, you know, recording things in the natural world, or operating, you know, playing the kind of these unpredictable instruments, you’re gonna get sounds, you’re gonna get patterns, you’re gonna get sequences that are not going to fit with our, with those traditions. And so, so I guess the question is, how do you see these things fitting together? Like, in a way? Are we trying to undo the work that the traditions have done and training us to? Do the traditions make us kind of unable to hear certain things? And then we’re trying to unlearn those? Or, you know, or is there something else happening? So anyway, it’s just kind of it’s pretty broad question, but I just invite you to, to reflect on that relationship between the deep tradition that we inherit, and kind of the work that you’re doing that is really interacting with things that are very outside that tradition.
Matthew Burtner 48:37
Right, right. I think that’s so interesting, I really feel like that it’s always about a process of opening. So like, in my own experience, the the knowledge of music, and the ability to listen more closely to understand what I’m hearing to parse out voices. This is all about, you know, opening up new dimensions of listening, and being able to appreciate levels of sound that I wasn’t able to appreciate before. So I definitely think of it in that the knowledge really helps, you know, open up the world to to just different dimensions of of aesthetics, and that that’s just been a continually rewarding experience. I also, you know, recognize that sometimes, you know, people who study music, then they, you know, maybe don’t, they don’t find themselves, like appreciating something. It’s like too simple because it doesn’t use it. But my, my feeling on that is that, that it’s never gets more simple. It just gets more and more rich, and you just kind of like find your way. So that’s things that you would have thought of as being simple. You just haven’t figured out how to listen to them yet. You know, so they’re, they’re complex, but you just don’t No it yet. And then you keep listening, keep discovering you find the complexity that’s already there. Or if something sounds chaotic, it just means you you don’t haven’t listened to it and enough to understand its order. Its you know, beauty. And so you know that this has been my my process of discovery, both learning, you know, traditional music, which I was, I was trained in traditional music, theory and analysis and but then moving past that into computer music, and beyond that into eco acoustic music. For me, it’s just been, every new kind of technology and new theory has just opened up, opened up new worlds of sound, sound that was always there. I mean, I’ve been listening to the glaciers for as long as I’ve been alive, because I grew up around glaciers. But now I listen to the glaciers, and I hear an incredible symphony and a kind of intelligence and, and a real beauty. That was invisible, or inaudible to me before.
Michael Livermore 51:10
Yeah, maybe we could just thinking about, like, where we grew up, and that kind of put in place. And that’s important importance for us. And also, you know, obviously, climate change. And, you know, one of the women kind of even gotten into the kind of environmental politics, right, so there’s, there’s a way in which the music that you’re creating is a kind of operates on an aesthetic level that is, you know, kind of, I don’t know, if it’s independent from politics, but it has its own status, let’s just say, but then there is anything about the environment has a political values to, especially if we’re talking about ice, and the Arctic and climate change. And so I guess, one, one question for you generally, is, how much of that kind of political reality political context do you see as informing your work? Or is it? Or are these things kind of independent in your mind, and obviously, your own kind of personal history and growing up in Alaska, and, you know, kind of how that’s informed your choice of, of subjects? I guess? Well,
Matthew Burtner 52:19
I think of the work a little bit because of my biography, I guess I think of it as kind of accidentally political than that, in that I started off working in this in this way, because I loved the natural world, and I love the sounds of it. And, and I thought human music was cool, but not nearly as not nearly as powerful as some of the things I heard in the natural world. And so, you know, I wanted to kind of discover how that could be become part of music. And then it was because of, you know, living in Alaska and studying music at a time of rapid global warming, when we were experiencing the dramatic effects of climate change early on in Alaska, then that work took on kind of later a political dimension. I don’t mind that at all, I think that if there’s a way that the music could intersect with, with discourse around issues that matter to people, that’s just fantastic. And, you know, I certainly have ideas about, you know, political ideas. And I feel like the music is a little bit separate from my political ideas in that what I tried to do is create like a space for contemplating these topics. And I’ll let other people kind of let other people frame the message. And kind of address that in the way that they think it fits the context. So in in my own way, that’s like not to create the message, but rather just to let people learn by listening and feel like emotionally connected to these ideas and celebrate them through melody and, and rhythm and just concept. And that, that, you know, just that, that process of, of listening to the world will open up in them a similar kind of feeling of empathy for the world. That’s, you know, so it’s a kind of a politics of, you know, not persuasion, but rather just like presentation. And I’m happy with that, you know, so and that’s, I think also helped the music find its find a place in, in these discourse, like, like the music being used, like when the State Department asked me to create music for their event, if they wanted like ambient music that would be based on the subject of their gathering but not, you know, something with like, a lot of fight song or anything like that, right? This is like a very kind of a different kind of music that’s really celebrating the natural world opening up as an aesthetic space so that Obama could put a message in there, you know, and then his message was, you know, about addressing climate change at the Paris accord that was coming up. And then that happens. But that’s like another person’s field like those that’s for the politicians, as far as I’m concerned, and they know how best to address those things. Meanwhile, I love it, that the music can be a part of that, of that discourse.
Michael Livermore 55:40
Yeah, and, you know, one kind of related discourse, I guess, or related kind of reality that we face in the kind of the Anthropocene. And just the political moment that we’re in, is, there’s a lot of folks that are doing this to say there’s an inevitable amount of climate change that’s on the horizon. And it’s obviously going to have tremendous consequences for the Arctic. And the question that we have is really, you know, how much and how bad not weather? And, and I just wonder, again, this is kind of with your own personal history, and then the recent album and the work that you’ve been doing in the in the Arctic? You know, is there a coming to terms with, with the with, with these changes? Are there? Is there a mourning that’s happening? Or is it a celebration? Or are these things kind of entangled? Like, I guess that that’s kind of the question is, you’re capturing a moment in time and a place, it’s always changing, of course, over, you know, millennia, but now we’re, you know, it’s, we’re entering into a time of more profound change. And I guess, yeah, the question is, kind of, is that partially what motivated this work at this time? And yeah, your own kind of feelings about the, if there’s sadness involved, or if it’s something that, you know, we can just kind of focus on what we have now and celebrate it?
Matthew Burtner 57:03
Well, art has, Art has always given us a place to deal with tragedy. And that and that can be I mean, we can, you know, dance to the song about death, we can sing along with the melody about, about a lost love, of, you know, a lost love. And these kinds of love songs, and these kinds of, you know, dancing to destruction, topics of destruction, this is part of what musics been doing for a long time. In many ways, I think that the subject, you know, the methods the same, if there’s morning involved, music is going to give us a place to a way to mourn, it’s going to give us a space to, you know, allow our emotions to express and, and, you know, maybe it’s maybe the songs are not about, about breakups, you know, maybe that maybe they’re about, you know, the loss of the polar ice, or the loss of the glaciers, or, you know, the loss of a coast or the, you know, acidification of the ocean, or the arid, arid of forests, you know, they’re, they’re going to be about topics of the environment, because we feel deeply about these things, people feel deeply about them, and we are already kind of warning them. So, you know, it’s not the mean, I just think that it’s, it’s kind of like a love song, right? It’s like, it’s like another kind of way of, of expressing art as a place for, for mourning. That’s just that’s been a way that arts dealt with these things, these topics. And then of course, you know, there’s also the, the active part of it, that’s not accepting necessarily, that these are inevitable outcomes, but that they’re, you know, there may be ways to ways to repair certain aspects of the environment to restore things. So right now, I’m, I’m working on a project called soundscapes of restoration. And it’s about listening to restoration projects. So we’re out at the Virginia coast. And we’re listening to the sound of seagrass beds. These seagrass beds were like nearly extinct, and they were brought back and they thrived again, and so here’s an example of, you know, a restoration project that is, you know, having a large positive effect on the on the ecosystem. Another one is like the oysters, we’re doing oyster reef restoration. Or we, the scientists are doing oyster reefs restoration, and I’m listening to that. So recording those sounds of the oyster reefs counting the number of oysters, this is another huge success story. So inside all these these tragedies, there’s also like, modes of sustainability and restoration. And we can lean into those things as well. And think about, you know, how we can do that in a way that’s, you know, conscientious and ethically sound and economically viable. And, you know, and then I’m going to make music out of those things. So those are, like more hopeful kinds of subjects, it doesn’t all have to be about, you know, loss necessarily, it can be about restoration.
Michael Livermore 1:00:53
Yeah, that’s, that, that makes that makes perfect. Perfect sense. So maybe the my last line of questions for you, today would be actually to return to a subject that you mentioned earlier, which is the notion of conceptual art. And you know, that this kind of, when you have layers, I mean, that in the music that you make, there’s there’s layers, there’s a lot of layers, and you know, and people can kind of approach these these songs in different ways, right. So they can, somebody can be a casual listener, and it can just kind of play in the background, right? Folks can kind of read more about the underlying music and the theory behind it or kind of get into, like understanding, for example, what the sonification is, if you’ve got a like a, a bloop that that where the Bloop is, you know, compressed, sound over like a year’s worth of a C extent data or kind of whatever you have there. And so I guess the question is kind of almost like a recommendation, or how you think listeners can kind of approach these kind of conceptual pieces at different layers? And what what how should they kind of interact with these things? Is that is it intended to operate at different levels? And then if folks are interested in getting more into the kind of meaning behind what’s happening? What are the what are your thoughts on how to best do that?
Matthew Burtner 1:02:27
Well, there’s in all I mean, I think, yes, I think they’re operating on different levels. So, you know, I work really hard to try to find a, an music as an expression of a kind of sonorous expression, that’s purely in the material domain, that is it has, you know, notes and rhythms like organized sound that is satisfying to listen to. So that it is, you know, listen, it is interesting to listen to that it unfolds in a way that leads you along, that doesn’t send you off, turn you off. And so there’s this kind of, like, it draws you in, like, I’m trying to make something that draws draws me in as a listener. And I guess I would like that to also then work for other people to draw them in. So on one level, the music’s like, designed completely to be understood on its own, like, if it came on the radio, and you didn’t know what it was, you might just hear that and go, Whoa, what is what is this, this is interesting, I’m, I’m curious, I’m enjoying it. And then on another level, there’s, you know, it’s conceptual art. So the complete reverse of that would be you just read about it in a program, and it’s like, oh, wow, that idea for a piece is really interesting. Like, that’s actually a really compelling idea. And then that needs to also be worked out in the piece so that there’s like, this kind of conceptual unfolding that’s just as interesting as the material unfolding of the, of the sound itself. So like, when you put those things together, hopefully the experience can be multifaceted, it can be kind of engaging your curiosity in your mind, but also like kind of making you feel things with your body in your, you know, in your ears, and that that could be all working together. That’s the kind of ideal situation but it usually doesn’t happen like that. It’s usually more or less one or the other in different ways of listening. But I worked really hard to put all that in there. You know, so the pieces should be able to be approached just as sound as melodies as you know, on their surface, what’s there, but then it’s like, the sonification of an Arctic lagoon, like it’s a pretty nice electronic track. You know, you can listen to it, not know anything about what it’s doing not even know the title of you’d like Oh yeah, that was a that’s a really nice piece of sound work. But then if you start understanding that every single sound in that piece is like coat is correlated to a data a specific data in the environment like light and velocity and the water and temperature and, and that everything is actually have a real place that’s unfolding in a year, then it’s kind of like it’s kind of an incredible experience because it’s it’s like that thing that you thought was just an interesting sound object takes on another meaning connects to another field. And then it’s like a rich space for discovery. That’s that’s kind of my you know, my ideal so I’m, like always working on the conceptual side and on the material side. Yeah, well, it’s
Michael Livermore 1:05:43
absolutely wonderful work. Thanks so much for sharing something with us today and your thoughts has been a real pleasure to chat with you.
Matthew Burtner 1:05:51
Mike, thanks so much for having me on your on your show. I just I just love talking to you.
Free Range Podcast 