Scientists can measure the rate at which glaciers melt by making underwater audio recordings of them shifting and calving, then reducing those sounds to predictive formulas. But what if, in addition to providing useful data, the sounds of melting glaciers became music?
Montréal composer Sophie Kastner's "Terminus" does just that, incorporating those underwater recordings into a composition for string quartet. The piece is one of the works inspired by and derived from science and data on the program of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra's Jukebox Quartet concerts this weekend, titled "The Sound of Science."
Music, with its unique relationship to emotion, might seem at odds with the dispassionate realm of data. But using data to create music is just "a new and different way to tell a story," said Matt LaRocca, the VSO's artistic adviser and project conductor, who curates the Jukebox series.
"Data can underscore a concept, but numbers are hard to digest sometimes," LaRocca said. "Being able to channel it through music can tell a more relatable story."
The Jukebox Quartet — violinists Brooke Quiggins Saulnier and Jane Kittredge, violist Stefanie Taylor, and cellist John Dunlop — generally performs on miked instruments outside the traditional concert hall. This weekend's venues are a draw in themselves: the Roots Studio Space in Rutland; Beta Technologies in South Burlington, where some of the world's first electric airplanes are in development; and the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium in St. Johnsbury.
That last venue is where LaRocca obtained records of Vermont's temperatures between 1970 and 2019 for his piece "Bullseye," which is on the weekend program. Named for the circular rash associated with Lyme disease, the work combines the meteorological data with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's record of Lyme cases in the state during the same 50-year span. LaRocca fed spreadsheets of both trends into an online web application that "sonifies" data, tweaking the program to create acoustic music for the quartet.
The piece, covering a year every two measures, features only viola and cello until 1988, when the first case of Lyme is detected in Vermont. From there, the work is like "a rolling ball that gathers energy and pace and sonic material until the end," LaRocca said.
Retired Middlebury College professor Peter Hamlin created his own methodology to compose "Lake Champlain — 11 hours, July 18, 2023," also on the program. The piece is derived from 11 hours of wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather station on Diamond Island, off Ferrisburgh. He checks its data regularly before taking his 22-foot sloop out on the lake.
"I wanted to capture in sound the way I feel on the water," he said.
The piece begins gently and builds as the wind picks up, then calms down again. "It's like a little musical moment on the lake," Hamlin said. The quartet will improvise over an electronic score; both scores were determined by wind speeds and direction. Hamlin mapped the NOAA data onto the musical circle of fifths to create the eight-minute piece.
Audiences will be able to make music from their own data sets in preperformance workshops, using a free version of the program LaRocca used to compose his piece. He recommends that participants bring their own computers and any data sets that interest them.
A Nordic skier's heart rate monitor readings? A runner's mileage and pace? It can all be music.