You may have heard of whale song, the patterns of sound that whales make to communicate with each other. But what about glacier song, or seagrass song? Alaska-raised composer Matthew Burtner is sharing an unusual kind of music at this year’s Sitka WhaleFest.
Matthew Burtner once wrote a nocturne – for moths.
“I was thinking of these moths and how they have these beautiful ears,” Burtner says. “They’re like, these kind of feathers on their throat. You see a picture of a moth and it has these two different-sized feather things. So I thought well, I’ll make some music for the moths so that they can use their hearing to hear something beautiful too.”
Moths can’t hear the music we listen to, since their ears are attuned to higher frequencies. So, Burtner wrote something they could hear. The resulting piece, ‘Moth Song,’ is one of many works that Burtner has composed over his career in ecoacoustics, which he says all boils down to an effort to help humans better connect with the natural world.
Burtner, who was born in Naknek and grew up around Alaska, says that the sounds of the natural world have always resonated with him.
“When I was learning music, I would play music outside, with that presence of the environment,” he says. “So they were somehow connected to me — the sounds of the wind, and the snow and the water, and the sounds of, you know, my saxophone or the piano, or whatever I was playing.”
Burtner has now built an award-winning career around turning nature into music, using both recorded sound and scientific data that he transforms into sound. One of his current projects focuses on the seasonal changes of an Arctic lagoon. Scientists monitored the lagoon’s temperature, salinity, light, and currents over the course of a year, and Burtner transformed that data into sound that allows listeners to hear how the lagoon shifts with the seasons.
“We get a kind of sonic sense of the way the ecosystem works, the dynamics of it, and it’s actually like very pronounced in the sound,” he says. “It’s much more impactful than looking at a graph of it.”
Recording the elusive sounds of glaciers, seagrass beds, and cooling lava isn’t easy. Burtner says your standard microphone probably won’t cut it.
“When you’re dealing with, you know, tundra, or a river covered in three feet of ice, and you want to record that, there aren’t reall, ready-made devices for that,” he says. “So a lot of it is figuring out what you might hear there, because you can’t really always know, and in a way, that’s why we’re going there.”
He says there’s always some amount of risk when you’re recording in extreme environments.
“I just have a kind of ‘YOLO’ approach to it, where I’ll save and save and save and save money and write grants, and I’ll get this one piece of gear, and then I’ll just go throw it out in the ocean and hope for the best,” he says.
Burtner sees his work as a way to open humans up to an expanded awareness of the natural world.
“Music is, we think of that as a human expression,” he says. “But if we extend life and humanness or beingness to the glacier, then certainly it is making music. You know, if it has the characteristics of a being, it will probably make music too. If we don’t recognize that music, that’s really our own shortcoming, not the glacier’s shortcoming.”
You can find Burtner’s work at matthewburtner.com. Burtner and Arctic Scientist Christina Bonsell will discuss the Arctic Lagoon Sonification Project during the WhaleFest Symposium on Saturday, 11/4 at 1 pm. For more information, go to sitkawhalefest.org.
