Currents (2020)
Currents is an octet (fl, ob, cl, a.sax, tpt, hn, tbn, perc) that musically depicts the NOAA’s database of the last forty years of billion dollar weather disasters in the United States. The data is translated into music through sonification, which can be described as “the process of mapping data with some other meaning into sound” (John Luther Adams, The Place Where You Go To Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music). Movement I is an entirely acousmatic sound piece created using Max/MSP. It provides an overview of the entire dataset from 1980 to 2019 using visual graphs, natural recorded sounds, and FM synthesized sounds. The subsequent four movements (II to V) each represent one decade of this timeline and uses sonified data in the form of notated music for the instruments to perform. Each instrument is assigned a specific weather event to depict throughout the piece, most prominently in a solo moment that views one weather event in detail. The last movement (VI) is a chance-based game that pits two opposing forces of the instrumentalists against each other as the weather events carve out an uncertain future for our planet.
Collectively, the 258 weather events depicted in the piece have cost $1.75 trillion and have taken 13,249 lives. From 2010-2019 alone, there were 119 events that cost $802 billion and claimed 5,217 lives. Currents is a way of giving this data a more visceral narrative, keeping the conversation afloat about the urgency of climate change and the ominous shift in weather patterns on our planet.
Excerpts of the work can be seen below:
Movement 1: Jet Stream
Movement 1 (Jet Stream) is a visual piece that whips through the 40 years of data in about 8 minutes. The computer program Max/MSP was used to create this entire movement. The field recordings used in this piece were recorded with my Zoom H4 handheld recording device in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and on the Island of Hawai’i. The three sets of natural sounds (crickets, ocean, birds) represent three different environments (land, sea, and sky), functioning as an abstract barometer that allows us to check in and take readings on the health of three distant biomes on our planet.
You can view the movement in the video below.
Click here to see how the sonification for Movement 1 was created.
Click here to see how how the programming/coding for Movement 1 was created.
Movements 2-5: Solo Weather Events
Unlike Movement 1, the rest of Currents features a live octet instrumentation playing notated music. Each of the eight instrumentalists are featured in a “solo event” that depicts one major weather event from the last 40 years in detail. The performers interact with electronic effects using Max/MSP to add an element of improvisation and timbral experimentation to each performance. Below is a video collection of seven of these “solo events", first premiered at Earth Day Art Festival in 2021.