Two years ago, a largely unknown recording called Music From The Ocean cracked my “Top 50 Records Of 2006” list. I called it the 17th best release of the year, a shocking feat considering none of my friends or readers had ever heard of it. A few months ago, I decided to share that album with my readers. I wrote, “From the moment I first read about this album on the Aquarius Records mail order list, I knew I had to own it.” I silently hoped — much like my decisions to post the Anna Black and Chango recordings — I would be contacted by its creator. I even included the teaser, “I have no way of knowing if this album is still in-print. If someone can find evidence that it is, I’ll remove the download link.” I was practically begging to be contacted. Much to my surprise, Bob L. Sturm left a comment expressing gratitude and shock that he was featured so favorably on this website. I immediately found his e-mail address and submitted a request to interview him about his life and his absolutely astounding musical/scientific project, Music From The Ocean. The following conversation took place via e-mail over the course of a month. It was fascinating to learn that everything I’d heard about how the album was made was WRONG! That sure made the rest of the interview enlightening for me. I hope you don’t feel as dumb reading Bob’s answers as I did…he’s one smart fellow! Anyway…enjoy! This has been one of the most exciting interviews for me to conduct, even if my questions all sound stiff and professional.
EL: [redacted]
BLS: Bob L. Sturm
EL: Could you please explain to people who are not as smart as you (or myself) what exactly you do for a living?
BLS: I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), Paris 6, in a cool laboratory that works on many aspects of music and audio, from signal processing (the group I belong to), to modeling room acoustics, studying the acoustics of musical instruments, building new instruments (one of which is a very light-weight carbon fiber guitar), to psychological aspects of sound perception. After this fellowship is finished in December, I hope to begin a new research position, or to be employed as an assistant professor somewhere.
EL: Have you always wanted to be a musician, or has your work transformed you into one?
BLS: For a long time I have had interest in both science and music. I started piano lessons when I was 13 because I wanted to learn music notation; and soon after got my first keyboard synthesizer (Kurzweil K2000) and computer. Influenced by Gustav Mahler and Philip Glass (among many others), I taught myself how to compose via the computer, and continued this through college. During my four years at the University of Colorado, Boulder, alongside classes for my major in physics, I took music theory and private composition lessons. Barring some identity crises here and there, I graduated with a degree in physics in 1998, and had my electroacoustic composition, “Godcycles”, selected for performance at a national music conference.
In 1998 I began a masters degree in computer music at Stanford University (Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics), and while there I developed techniques for applying the physics I had learned to constructing musical systems of simulated particles — which is detailed in my article “Composing for an ensemble of atoms: the metamorphosis of scientific experiment into music”. The first composition that came from this is “50 Particles in a Three-Dimensional Harmonic Potential: An Experiment in 5 Movements”, which has some moments that I really enjoy. I became aware of the research potential of such work when I learned of the International Community for Auditory Display, and so I presented my sonification work there. That was when I saw the benefit of having a good set of ears, having much practice in working with sound, and being versed in science and mathematics.
A few years later I was employed by the Coastal Data Information Program, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in San Diego. As a research programmer there, I was constantly working with data collected by near-shore ocean buoys. One day I decided to listen to it, as I had done with the simulated particle systems. And so began a second reseach track into studying oceanography with sound, which resulted in “Music from the Ocean,” as well as my composition “Pacific Pulse” .
Now, several years later, I am an engineer in signal processing specializing in applictions to music and audio. In a sense my interest in composing music has transformed me into an engineer.
EL: When did you realize you could marry your creative artistic tendencies with your studies and work?
BLS: It was more of a realization that the two had become merged several years before, as well as the thought that the two, practicing Art and Science, involve the same type of creativity. In the “metamorphosis” article cited above, I discuss how I became a “composerscientist” while composing “50 Particles…” because I had to think like a physicist to bring about my vision as an artist. I muse about a gigantic particle collider, like the LHC, when I wrote, “The concert space could be the control room of a particle accelerator, with the composerscientist at the great instrument’s controls bringing about significant science as well as moving music using the most elementary pieces of the universe.” That is my vision, not unlike Hesse’s Magister Ludi and the Glass Bead Game.
I must say, however, that I wish not to conflate Art and Science. They are not the same; but each can benefit the other. At the risk of sounding academic, in “Metamorphosis” I write, “This is not to say that Bach can only be fully experienced with an understanding of statistical mechanics; nor only with an understanding of Bach can statistical mechanics be fully appreciated. But having knowledge of a metaphor between particle physics and music can certainly enrich the experience of both.” (I quote it because I can’t say it any better.) The incredibly humbling and completely non-common sense notions provided by Science — the greatest human collaboration in the history of the world — help me experience Art in deeper ways than I think possible if I were not curious in the how the world works.
EL: Do you solely create electronic music, or do you dabble in acoustic instrumentation as well?
BLS: Because of my limited acoustic vision and ability to play an instrument, I have mostly stayed in the realm of electronic music. The reward is quicker for me, although the time it takes to code, debug, experiment, and finally compose, remaster, and diffuse in a concert space is by no means easy, and I guess requires its own kind of virtuosity. However, I have composed some purely acoustic pieces, one of which I recently finished during my hiatus between finishing my doctorate and starting this research position in Paris (Facebook Video Link).
EL: Do your future plans include any computer or acoustic albums?
BLS: Not at this moment. Since I am happily employed as an engineer, I make my music available for free on the Internets.
EL: Okay, so how exactly was Music From The Ocean recorded? I read somewhere it was microphones attached to buoys? Can you elaborate? Where were the buoys, how did you attach the microphones, how did they record!? Can you please provide details about kinds of microphones and recording techniques?
BLS: I do not know who first said that I was riding on buoys with microphones, but in reality this album was created on land, within a computer. I wrote the software producing the sounds from the buoy data in MATLAB. The near-shore buoys are maintained by the Coastal Data Information Program of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. This group provides near real-time dissemination of ocean conditions around the U.S. using data collected from these buoys. The buoys are sitting out there in the ocean, bobbing up and down, recording accelerations in the XYZ-plane. Every 27 minutes, a buoy transmits its measurements to a field station on-land, and the data is then sent to CDIP for processing. Several products are calculated from the data, like wave height, and spectral content, and these are made available on the web. It is the spectral content that I use to synthesize the sound.
You can think of a buoy as a contact microphone on the largest diaphragm on Earth. It moves up and down, side to side, depending on how the surface is vibrating. I am just transforming these motions into audible sound. This results in something that is much more interesting than would be created by just attaching a microphone to a buoy. With this approach, we can peer at multiple levels of the complex phenomena in the ocean. It is like an anatomy book with painted transparent pages. Turn the first page and you go from seeing the skin to the underlying muscles. Another page turn and we see how the nervous and circulation system are distributed.
EL: What is the significance of all the track names? Are those equations or formulas or locations or depths? So confusing for half-wits like me!
BLS: In order to hear the ocean buoy data, we need to map its frequency range (0.025 – 0.58 Hz) to one that is audible ( 20 — 20,000 Hz). The first 13 tracks experiment with 13 different mappings on the same dataset. Each equation relates a buoy frequency (n) to an aural frequency (f).
EL: Where exactly were these sounds recorded? What body of water?
BLS: Most of the data is collected from the Pacific in Southern California, though some tracks use data collected near San Francisco.
EL: What exactly are we hearing on a given track, and WHY do those sounds occur/exist?
BLS: This is an extremely interesting question. Essentially, what you hear are the complex interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere, either in the vicinity of the buoy, or from thousands of miles away. Energy is transfered from the atmosphere to the ocean by wind and pressure changes that push on small waves. As more energy is transferred, the waves become larger. An example is a storm at sea, where the wind acts over very large areas of the ocean, known as the fetch. Waves are radiated from this fetch, and travel great distances until they reach land. An interesting thing to know is that wave energy with lower frequency travels faster than that with higher-frequency. So as the waves leave the fetch, they develop into wave trains, where the low frequencies outrun the high frequencies. Now, when you are sitting at a buoy and you begin to hear a lot of energy in low frequencies, you know that you are feeling the first effects from a storm out at sea. As the wavetrain passes, the energy will become more concentrated in higher and higher frequencies, until at last the effects of the storm cannot be discriminated from the activity in the vicinity of the buoy. So what all this means is that in the sonifications, when you hear a frequency sweep from low to high, then you know that you are hearing the effects of a storm that occured somewhere at sea. The duration of that sweep tells you how far away that storm occurred. For instance, if the sweep takes a long time, then the storm occurred much further away than a brief sweep. There are other interesting things you can hear as well, such as the difference in activity between the seasons, and the afternoon wind swells occuring in Southern California.
EL: Can you tell me about your decision to include the flash presentation and research paper on your CD? Didn’t you realize that people like me would be made to feel inferior!?
BLS: First of all, this CD is a piece of scientific research. I want it to be clear in its presentation, as well as completely reproducable. Second of all, this CD is a pedagogical instrument. I want it to be useful as a demonstration of scientific sonification, as well as concepts of physical oceanography. I have used it in these respects many times, and it seems with great success. The sonifications provide alternative and memorable illustrations of the interface between the atmosphere and ocean; and I provide a Flash presentation so that one can learn what is going on. Finally, this CD is experimental computer music. The last portion of the CD looks at how sonification of ocean buoy data can be treated in an artistic manner. In the end I do not think any of these compositions are successful in themselves. I later returned to these methods and used a different compositional method that I believe was much more successful in my piece “Pacific Pulse”. In short, this required me to ignore my desire to maintain the data in its chronological format; I made the choice to work on Art instead of Science, and not simultaneously.
EL: Can you tell people how to order a copy of the CD if they so desire?
BLS: Well, I do have about 200 copies sitting in an attic in California; but as I live in Paris, France now, people will have to wait until I go back for a visit. In the meantime, although you won’t have the excellent liner notes, I encourage people to download the CD from your website, and retrieve the relevant research papers here.
So there you have it! Bob L. Sturm is a genius and you are not. Now let’s all enjoy the cool sounds he’s made, and maybe use more recent data on our own to create our own beautiful soundscapes! Thanks Bob!
Listen to tracks from Music From The Ocean:
• Foam And Froth Of Faraway Storms
• storms, 029 and 071 200101-200102
• a = 0.05
