 Good evening everyone and welcome to Gulf Coast Acoustomologies tonight's iteration and continuation of this series anthroposonic I'm Rebecca Snedeker and I direct the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University And we are a interdisciplinary place-based institute that supports the understanding of this region and its relationship to the global and the Planetary all of our programming is based on the belief that the more we understand where we are The more fully we can engage in our democracy and our collective destiny Our assistant director dr. Denise Frazier and I co-conceived of and launched the anthroposonic series two years ago in fall 2021 and since then we featured an artist or ensemble each semester who is collaborating with and creating compositions in Collaboration with non-human entities as in a river a whale or an oil rig We want to thank our faculty colleagues in the Newcombe Department of Music who have partnered with us on different presentations in this series Including Courtney Brian Jesse McBride Anna Maria Achoa Gautier Matt Sacchicchini and Lee Vera Raghavan and their chair Dan Sharp Each year we've hired a graduate student from the music department to work on our team and we've commissioned work by those students Ryan Clark and Demi Ward that will be presented tonight Anthroposonic is funded through the Center's music rising at Tulane program and through a generous grant from Newcombe Institute's Dorothy Beckmeyer Skow art music fund and we also want to thank Laura Walford who has served as Newcombe Institute's interim executive director throughout the academic year For her support and to welcome Anita Raj the incoming executive director to Tulane I also want to thank Regina Karen's our executive secretary as well as all of the artists Additional faculty students and audience members in our ecosystem and extend gratitude to each of you for being here this evening Alive and present and tuning into your surroundings here on this Monday evening in spring 2024 a few housekeeping notes the evening is being documented by Tulane libraries Thank You Alan and it will be posted on our Vimeo page and on the more mundane the restaurants Excuse me no restaurants the restrooms are out these double doors at the top of the room And then when you exit those you can take your first right and then another right and the bathrooms will be on your left right around there This evening's program includes two movements if you will part one will begin with Anthroposonic Reflections which is a brief look back at the history of the Center for the Gulf South's music and soundscape programming from around 2011 to today with dr. Janice Frazier Ryan Clark and myself I'll guide us on a brief history of the Center's music and soundscape programming from the early years through Anthroposonic and then dr. Frazier will speak in more detail about the Anthroposonic series and then Ryan Clark will speak about Organizing listening to Southern resistance and the creation of a short film that he created last year in part Two will move to Anthroposonic seismic studies and a reflection of work from this year Corey Diane will present their research Gulf Coast epistemologies and then for this year's live sound lab They're electric acoustic ecology ensemble which includes Corey Diane Clementine Hartman and Peter Boling will perform reverie for the Balian of the Gulf of Mexico of many and no known names and Finally our gathering will close with the composition by Demi Ward And he will they will speak about the creation of the composition we commissioned which was playing when you entered and will also be playing as the event closes So I'm going to go right into the part one Anthroposonic Reflections So after this first two years with the Anthroposonic series We wanted to take this opportunity to share this background of how we got to where we are Music rising at Tulane this program has evolved from a focus on regional music and cultures of the Gulf South toward incorporating music and sound studies in the context of environmental studies and Concepts of the Anthropocene and the plantation as seen or more broadly to say to explore music and sound studies at the intersection of cultural and planetary health the Center for the Gulf South launched in 2011 and fairly quickly received a $1.5 million grant from the music rising foundation And I'm going to show a few slides. Can y'all hear me? Okay These are these first two slides are screen grabs from this website Some of you some of you know the music rising foundation was a post-Katrina initiative spearheaded to give instruments to musicians after the federal levee failure and Urban flooding and it was led by producer Bob Ezrin and you choose the edge Under the leadership of doctors Larry Powell and Joel Denerstein and Karen Celeston and an advisory council and faculty cohort the team created an extensive digital humanities website as Well as university and K-12 curricular resources and a coordinate major for undergraduate students Much of this content was organized by genre including jazz blues Side-to-co RMB and bounce in the fall of 2015 I started my tenure as executive director of the center almost eight years ago and Inherited this music rising program and as I was thinking towards the future of the music programming at the center I noticed that the site content was at the time almost all male There was a few female vocalists, but very few female and female identified Instrumentalists and few living artists so I was interested in creating public programming with a wider diversity of musical voices educational purposes and also to add to the documentation of this regional humanities website that first semester I worked with arts educator Sonia Robinson who many of you know who was our K-12 educator engagement director And we created one-day workshops for K-12 teachers in the region and also prepared a grant to the NEA To host a landmark workshop for American history and culture We chose New Orleans as our as our national landmark and explored the parallel and intersecting histories of the creative expression of musical Cultures and art forms here with civil rights with the history of civil rights with a team of about 40 artists scholars and civil rights activists in Fall 2016 Dr. Denise Frazier started her tenure as assistant director of this center And I was of course thrilled to welcome her strengths as a Latin Americanist performance artist musician and Houstonian and beautiful human being and She had started by the time we received the good news for the for the NEH funding And we brought Bruce Sumpai Barnes on board his workshop co-director co-director and Hosted this week-long experience for two different summers. I Forgot about the slides so much you have some slides now So these are just some screen grabs from the website and some images from the programming with K-12 students in the region This was at the Homer Plessy school when it was in the quarter and These are images from the NEH workshop that we hosted and here's our workshop co-director Bruce welcome These are also images from that teacher workshop we also started a tradition of Pulling together all of this all the courses that we could find out about a tooling that focused on New Orleans in the Gulf South region and Every semester we choose two different individuals one historical one contemporary To put at the top of our posters We've been like called out several times for who we put we do not we're not Heroicizing any of the people on the posters because none of us from the region are perfect They're they're maybe they're not for sale, but that's thank you for asking we we will We were gonna we were working on like publicizing what we've done and and sharing our documentation and materials So we're really in a phase of which is part of why I'm telling this story tonight So yeah, thank you for asking So one of the reasons we did those posters was not only because of the musical cultures of the Gulf South Academic major but also just for the for our community to lane to be able to see the rich and Like rich array of coursework that relates to this place Because of this idea that we believe that we can be learning from our surroundings and that enriches our lives and our ability to Show up as individuals in the world We also around 2018 started an indigenous studies symposium now called the Tulane Gulf South indigenous studies symposium and and every year have brought in different people who speak about music indigenous music to help fill in these Gaps that many of us have experienced of not knowing enough about the indigenous presence The ongoing indigenous presence and vitality in music from New Orleans and Bobancha And we partner with Rachel Brennan from neighborhood story project and Bruce Barnes again To create a series called loonion Creole which was a concert spring concert series at the neighborhood story project in the seventh ward and Oral history project and for three years During January through May we co-organized Concerts that began with oral histories of the musicians who were playing that evening And then followed with with concerts and that project is a book an album project that we hope to release in 2024 2025 These are some images and that concert also was we were fortunate to be Like how do I say this to? Be present for the first iteration of the Lays and L ensemble that Denise and Joe Darnsburg founded These are some images from inside neighborhood story project at at Roger Lewis's performance We've also partnered with faculty on many occasions In this evening we hosted an event with filmmaker Colleen Smith and composer Courtney Brian We've had several programs similar to that over the years and also through our research fellowships We've funded research related to to music in the region and these are some images from Matt Sakakini and Abdul Aziz's project and Kyle DeCoste and a and Anna Acho Agotier and a German scholar Gwendolyn who is looking at the relationship of accordions and horses inside of co music We've also hosted several like immersive educational experiences was a Trip related to the history of bounce music that moved throughout the city and there's some images with cheeky black and dancer Marissa Joseph and A stop at Peaches record store so we do a lot of these immersive place-based experiences with students faculty and the public Finally I want to sort of Finally ebb toward anthroposonic by saying around 2018 we accepted an invitation to host the culmination of a two-year study of the human impact on the Mississippi River Called the Anthropocene River campus and that project was one of the times where we really it's really a formative foundational experience for us to move Into studying the history of human impact on earth and planetary change and we met some sound artists and ethnomusicologists Here's an image of Monica Haller and a Matt Rahim Who also were using sound and music to explore our relationship to the planet around that time? I met Geophysicist named Ben Holtzman who's done a lot of work. He's at Columbia's Computer Music Center looking at creating Donna's data sonification and using sound as a way to Help humans perceive Scientific data so he was working on the how to how do earthquake sound and the fact that when an earthquake happens The earth rings like a bell and making audio and visual images of that to help us understand the phenomena And I thought like wow who who was doing that in our region, which is like a jumping ahead to Corey Diane's work tonight So basically through through this work and I guess in some We just want to say that while we still very much support like just straight up beautiful forms of music and the Incredible depths of music language and our musicians who perform and live here and the like continuity of that We're also really welcoming in these diverse voices these collaborations between humans and non-humans and Welcoming you all to engage in this exploration with us tonight's program is so beautiful. Thank you for listening to my Long introductory remarks, and I'm going to pass to dr. Frazier who's going to describe more about the anthroposonic series Mike's on Mike's on Mike's If you know this song, please sing it with me Do you believe in life after love? I can feel wait something inside me say I really don't think you're strong enough Raise your hand if you know why I just sang that song Okay, I am not surprised This was a new discovery for me, and I'm happy to share with you all Geophysics engineer Dr. Andy Hildebrand Created algorithms to support seismic studies to map the surface of the earth using sound waves He used the same algorithms to use audio to detect pitch in humans And thus autotune was born as a pitch correcting device Welcome to anthroposonic You've already been in it since the 90s. Oh Earlier than that Stevie Wonder. I just want to put that out there So anthroposonic basically seeks to stretch our Understandings and appreciations of how we collaborate with non humans and how we realize the interdependence of our species and plants and animals and machines Michaela Harrison Our first anthroposonic artist last fall our journey began with a profound work of Harrison's acclaimed well whispering project a Holistic aquamarine project based on her work with the humpback whales off the coast of Bahia, Brazil Harrison asks to be one with the earth She asked us to also contemplate the middle passage and to attune ourselves to the songs of our environment and This is a partnership on a whale whispering a sonic experience at Lincoln Beach with a shea cultural arts center for imagining America We also have these wonderful little Actions that we did on the beach at Lincoln Beach and And this is kudori forest This was the very first whale whispering that we did with community two-lane students faculty and staff and Here we are again at another whale whispering by the Crescent City in the park Okay, so The professors music professors This work would not have been possible without the support of a new come department of music I remember when I first asked Courtney if she would be interested in joining in this project and and you were down and I was very I was very happy for that So I want to just shout out Lee Anna Maria Jesse Courtney again Matt and Dan For all of our all of your support and as Rebecca already indicated the scow was fundamental to making this This dream come true I want to continue on to Lisa Lisa E. Harris was our second anthropoconic Artists from another Gulf City Houston Last year Lee was a rising resident at a studio in the woods and we also thank them And a Monroe fellow whose work related music to the lifecycle of oil wells So her live performance lab, which was filmed by Ryan Playfully and thoughtfully helped us Consider concepts as diverse as gentrification how we envision and treat the earth to the current issues of Nurtles gathered and sweeping along our coastal waters and I will just go through some of the actions that we did with Lisa and I will move on to our most recent anthropoconic, which was with lost by you tours And so we took community members students wonderful Fulbright scholar Daniela who is with us this semester and Tulane staff along Lily Bayou where Demi Ward Documented most of the sound for a beautiful soundscape That will play again if you didn't get a chance to listen to it on your way in and We learned about coastal erosion and wildlife in the swamps and this is something that we hope to continue again soon So these are just some pictures from that experience by One of our guides John has lit So now with this next slide, I will turn it over to Ryan to discuss listening for southern resistance An anthropoconic program that we co-created last year that led Tulane students Professors and staff and community members to examine three sites of environmental infrastructure and activism The residents of Gordon Plaza the Bonnie Kerry spillway and Ry St. James members. So thank you Okay So as Denise was speaking to I Herald it took part in listening for southern resistance, which was and Sort of an excursion that went through the petrochemical corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge it was planned to get to Baton Rouge But we made it to Norco Donaldsonville and here in New Orleans with Gordon Plaza, which is where we started Really the the exercise was an act in the field of acoustic ecology That's what it was based on but went a bit more beyond that to try to engage with the Plantation as seen whereas believe armory Schaefer was the guy that coined the term in the field acoustic ecology and it's a bit too based in some kind of like strange nationalistic conservative Pride so avoiding that I was hoping that we could engage it with Resistance and so we spoke with Ry St. James in Miss Sharon as well as Travis London with Jessica Dandridge with the water collaborative but we began in Gordon Plaza Where we spoke to some of the residents there where a part of this sound listening activity was By the people that live there so through acoustic ecology we wanted to listen to the health of the environment But not in a purely non-human way that these people who live there are a part of the environment and have something To say in engaging with the acoustic ecology I think it's a really important practice to begin to listen and engage with knowledges that aren't purely Didactic or spoken directly to and so it provides a bit more of a sort of Sematic awareness that what we're residing in we're taking in information regardless of if it's being spoken to us So yeah, Bonnie Kerry's spillway. This is rebel town, which we didn't get to but I think it's just an important image to understand Just really what's going on here and a single image, but the Bonnie Kerry's spillway was an effort in engaging with the infrastructural attention that happens Across generations. It was first Sellers, Louisiana where it was a plantation which was then sort of wiped out by native Native Americans were there before colonialism does its thing and Where the Bonnie Kerry's spillway was then built in the 1920s By the Army Corps of Engineers where it leads out is through is going over a Native American burial ground which was then which was then a slave burial ground as well and So trying to engage with all of these sorts of layers or strata of events into a single place I think it's just a really important way to engage ambiently, but also intentionally with the environment Travis London, Jessica Dandridge and Miss Sharon took part in the trip We got on two or one bus and it was really one enjoyable connection to spend the day with these Beautiful people and and listen to their own experiences and in knowledges that have either been censored or minimized or shut out altogether There's me there's my Sharon there's Anna We're having a great time and then lastly we stopped right in front of the then proposed, which I believe is now canceled 9.4 billion from osa Plan it's called the sunshine project and we did a sound mapping exercise Which is basically sort of a sonar engagement activity where if you imagine yourself to be the not the center but just the point of reference on a piece of paper and you're listening and Basically making a mapper making a cartography of the things that you can hear with the birds what you can't see is you know some tractors pipelines things like that and I think that's about it. Let's see Yeah, it looks like so lastly what I did in this room here with the anthroposonic with Lisa E. Harris was pretty much like a videography Exercise that although she did discuss Nerdles and Plastics and things like that what we're gonna watch is more so of an impressionistic take of what it felt like to be in This room, which was just a really communal Activity of collective listening, so we might not get the the academic portion, but that doesn't always matter so Start here The mosquitoes weren't there There was like wind You know, I had just enough layers. It was like everything was like really lining up and for that we get things so Let's just take a moment today and just You know We're just gonna jump around a little bit because this is an L a B Which means that? You can jump around remember your dream Okay, how many of you do not remember your dream? Do not like none of it. I want the ones who really do not remember their dreams Y'all believe that huh? We'll take that okay, if you don't remember your dreams a lot of people don't This question is a little lonely because it's like you remember your dreams, but Can you believe or be? Dreaming right now. Thank you Hello everyone. Oh Hello everyone Hi My name is Corey Diane. You can just call me Diane I want to thank Ryan and Denise and Rebecca for having us We're gonna I'm gonna do kind of a quick Little talk I'm gonna try to be quick about it a little bit Because then we're gonna present Some music so I want to give a little bit of an overview of the research and Science and context and ethic that has brought some of this music into the world and then with my really beautiful collaborators Clementine Hartman and Peter Jay bowling. We're gonna share some soundscapes with y'all Can everybody hear me? Okay, cool How y'all feeling? Word um, I just need to shake a little bit. I need to get some energy moving Um So over the past couple years General understanding that the Gulf of Mexico is Home to a unique and distinct species of whale is growing people tend to know that they all know that and in January of 2021 so just a little more than a year ago the national oceanic and atmospheric association announced that They were naming a whale the rice's whale baileo netra visee and The media really took it on in a different kind of way they took it on in this a new whale has been discovered Can you believe that in 2023? We're discovering a whale Um And it spoke to a degree of hubris and the reality is that people have been in relationship to this whale for time immemorial But just 20 years ago 30 years ago 70 years ago It was rather fringe in the field of marine biology to say that There was a resident whale in the Gulf of Mexico And when they were given the name rice's whale, they were named after a Gulf Coast Marine biologist named Dale Rice who in the mid 1950s found a strange unique Skull washed up on the shore of Louisiana And he started advocating that there was a unique Whale unique to the Gulf Coast waters And that was a very fringe belief and I actually, oh I have some technical difficulties earlier today, and so I just I Don't know. I'm telling you that forget that I was thinking about not Putting a picture of this whale on the slides One because they're kind of elusive and kind of evasive And just in 2017 when there was a big report on their endangered status put out one of my Favorite quotes from that is there is no official Description of this whale Even in 2017 and some of the research I'm going to talk about later They talk about how it's so bizarre that while they're accumulating all of these recordings of their songs They're really rarely cited and so For the sake of giving a short little presentation so that we can get to the music what I'm actually going to do is really a distillation of some of the science and I'm going to present some of the beautiful science that has been happening really over the past 50 to 70 70 years and especially the past 20 years Because they weren't just discovered in 2021 we moved to the next slide doctor Frazier So in the 2000s these whales were starting to be called the Brutus whale and Brutus was a Norwegian colonizer of South Africa who was a whaler and When they started to recognize are these whales of the Gulf of Mexico they decided that they were close kin of the whales that mr. Brutus brought to near extinction off the coast of South Africa there's a there's a part of the naming of Whales and of taxonomical science in general that can reinforce and sometimes replicate and sometimes do colonialism and so this is from a 2014 study, but you'll see the yellow dots are unidentified Beilean sightings and the pink dots are known Beilean sightings Brutus Brutus whale sightings. This is from 2014 so what one thing that we're going to talk about here is the is the ways that sound has been really useful and essential in Understanding these whales and increasing our understanding of these whales And affirming that they exist and that they have a right to exist and that they have a right to be recognized as a community Yes, so we can move to the next slide It's the same image But what's in a name? I you can tell I'm like kind of caught up on this name stuff right here So they've gone through a lot of names rice as well what they got right now Brutus whale before that Mr. Rice was calling them the Gulf Coast whale that was starting in the 50s but Even before that before they decided to call Brutus whale Brutus whale Their cousins were called the Eden's whale, which are an Indo-Pacific Beilean whale closely related to these whales as well Eden was a British dude who was a colonizer in the Indo-Pacific So I want to also present a couple other names we got by land Louisiana Creole for whale. We got Yamahuayo Ishikoi for big powerful fish. We got Nani Chito chocked off for great big fish So I'm gonna do a little bit more talking, but I want to say long live Nani Chito, Yamahuayo, Balen The rice as well the the baleen of the Gulf of Mexico of many and no known names. Oh Yeah, we can move on Okay I'm gonna talk about I'm gonna try to be real quick yell with me. Yeah. Yeah So there's a couple things. I want to just still in this presentation One is the importance of sound in marine conservation One is the significance of song in the story of these whales and Another is the unique way that sounds sounds of extractive economy of capitalism of oil extraction Uniquely in danger these whales as well so starting After the BP oil spill the deep water horizon disaster is when we first got the first concerted efforts to use underwater recording in the Gulf of Mexico To study the health of marine mammals marine life and also The impacts of the oil spill on them and so a standard practice is called passive acoustic monitoring PAM and the standard practice is to do floor Mounted recording units so after the oil spill they put seven units in in the Gulf of Mexico and as you can see the top ones Like h3 4 5 and 6 that's kind of that same pink spread from earlier And if you move on to the next slide Actually, I don't like this slide it's kind of ugly Actually go back to it, I'm sorry That area became became known as the preferred habitat of Then the Brutus whale now the rice's whale so those recordings were then used to document to get the original documentation of the repertoire of the rice's whale and Cataloguing of repertoire is very important in marine biology and specifically with whales and Here's a here's the first paper potential brides a whale call is recorded in the northern Gulf of Mexico by Aaron Rice different rice He's out of Cornell super nice dude in their Institute of bio acoustics and I think you can go to the next slide now and what he presented were these first spectrograms these visualizations of rice's whale songs and One thing you'll see in this presentation is the way the technology has advanced and But we get these first ever Documentations of potential rice's whale calls and they They put them in three ways down sweeps sweet sequences, which are these long Down sweeps long moans and tonal sequences and What this paper did was it established a repertoire and it advocated for increased funding for passive acoustic monitoring to better understand this population in the Gulf And specifically the risks that they are posed by anthropogenic sound one thing I didn't say Earlier is that when these whales are recognized as a species It was really bittersweet because they were also recognized as one of the most endangered species on the planet At that the the population is estimated to be 15 to 100 individuals I have some hope because that number keeps arising in this way But we see these first tonal sequences and we can move on to the next one And What that data also gave us was some insight into the ways that these whales are uniquely impacted by anthropogenic sound the Gulf of Mexico as we all know is a hotbed of oil activity of Shipping of ship ship traffic And This is just this is a map the you know the hotter the colors get the more active Specifically vessel traffic and seismic survey noises Anthropogenic sound is a term that's used to say sound created by human activities. Some people also say capital ogenic sound But it's it's kind of agreed that anthropogenic sound has increased in the ocean Over the past 50 years with an estimated doubling every decade And I'm skipping ahead in the science but this This next quote is from an important study released by the National Oceanic and Amatospheric Association Essentially when they listed the overall threat raking for anthropogenic noise as a medium high for these whales and that is because When the when the scientists Documented their songs they sing in some really unique ways including really low If you go can we go back to those those So you see on the left that's pitch that's frequency and they start generally at around 150 hertz Which is about a d3? Which is about a d3 and then they swoop down low-frequency sound travels really well underwater you can move forward and and You can go to the next one actually and the next one even One of the most Catastrophic sounds is that of seismic surveys? I meant to put a picture of a seismic study unit in this, but I didn't But basically it's been documented pretty much 20 hours a day every day of the year in the Gulf of Mexico The oil industry is is using these boats pulling behind them an air gun a giant gun that's pointed down at the floor of the ocean and Every 15 to every 10 to 30 seconds in the Gulf of Mexico it fires off and uses sound uses the pressure of air to map the ocean floor and This is this event is called Gulf of Mexico Gulf Coast Acoustomologies Acoustomologies is an academic term that essentially means ways of knowing through sound And I like to think I don't like to but I do think of the Gulf of Mexico as a place of competing Acoustomologies competing means of knowing through sound with very devastating consequences There's a range of impact to the sound of a seismic gun Beings in the line of fire can be killed less less severe biologic by but less severe physical injury further out And then the further you get out it just increases the ambient noise level of the Gulf of Mexico so right here These things on the left are actually divided in seven So the colorful one is the top of each one one two three four five six seven so these are correlated to the the recording units from earlier and so the red whenever you see red that's a hit of the seismic gun and Basically what you'll see when there's multiple reds across the vertical space It's really demonstrating that that sometime that when seismic guns are fired off the coast of Texas they are audible off the coast of Florida and that tells you how much Low-frequency sound travels underwater And so you'll see on this on the right. That's just a zoomed-in 122nd free fragment of a day, you know, and that's a hit pretty much every 10 seconds I have access to a lot of raw data of recordings of the Gulf of Mexico just like 24-hour recordings And if you just like scroll in it's just red at the bottom and often more often than not the sound of an Airgun is present either Distant or as foreground noise. Yeah Yeah, move on and then I'm gonna speed through the next thing. Okay, you can move on. Thank you We can go to the next thing. This is just saying that anthropogenic sound is bad This is a really exciting study. You go back to that one. This is where I want to get to y'all so The collection of the sound has been really important It's it's generated more funding and more interest in in the rice's whale in the Gulf and the whale the bailing of the Gulf of Mexico of many and no no names and So much so that they started putting Recording units across the Gulf of Mexico in places where there were unconfirmed sightings and Whereas just a couple of years ago. They were estimating the population at 15 to 50 now They're saying 15 to 100 and if you move to the next slide You'll see the circled area is the decode the Soto Canyon where they were there They were thought to be their primary habitat and then this Western Front area is where they've started doing some Studies and if you move forward The Most exciting news an interesting thing has happened and it is that you know those three variations of a call that I showed you earlier The whales in the western part of the Gulf of Mexico have wild diversity of calls That are not really seen in there in in the whales that are closer to us So the eastern at the top is the standard one the way now But then they've got all these other new things that are happening in the West new to us dip hills dense drop slope slope dense and It raises some interesting questions one 70 years ago. It was fringe to say they existed but wait are there distinct populations of these whales in the Gulf of Mexico? Do these whales interact do they migrate between places are they distinct? and It's also raising some questions around anthropogenic noise too because one thing you'll see in these top two You know, I said that their main frequency is that 150 Hertz But at these middle two right here if you can see at the top above 200 you'll see that little sliver of yellow That is a harmonic and if if y'all know the harm if you're familiar with a harmonic series 225 isn't the natural harmonic of 150 It is the second partial of 75 and you'll see down here at the bottom one You see a line around 75. There's actually some specular suggestion now that actually the rice's whales Fundamentally seeing lower than we thought that they do And that the tone that is coming through is actually a harmonic and that that these whales sing at a at a d quarter shop or sharp to Why is that significant Well, one because it's cool because they're singing in this harmonic spectrum and to because it I told acoustic masking is one of the effects of of Anthropogenic noise basically acoustic masking we all experience it during Mardi Gras When we're raising our voices to be heard in a party context when there's noise and there's bands and you start losing your voice When these whales are fundamentally singing at 75 Hertz they have to force themselves to be heard even greater than we expected, you know This is all speculation, but this is just what I'm into right now And then I don't think there's really anything else. Let's see. Oh Yeah, what also the thing about those whales that are in the in in the West We think they think that there's less of them and they're also much more at risk the West is like there's more more pipelines more Platforms just more traffic Yeah, they're threatened by anthropogenic sound, but they are also one of their main threats is Ship collision they like to sleep close to the surface under the stars and so Greater focus hopefully is being put on these whales in the West because they're greater vulnerability We can go on. I don't talk about this more But this is just some interesting or some of the first studies of whale song. He says humpback whales And you can just kind of go through quick. It's just some cool seismographs and also like Just thinking the the researchers Melissa, so the via is really really doing her thing at the National Oceanic and Amasphere Association Yeah Okay, I Think we should make some music So some context real quick Which all about to experience is the second workshop performance of Reverie for the bailing of the Gulf of Mexico of many and no known names I want to give a thank you to Dr. Frazier Denise. Where'd you go? And Renee Anderson over here The first iteration of this piece was for all five of us And because we were selected to perform this at a festival new music on the bayou on June 2nd And the limit was three performers. We're using this as a workshop opportunity to experiment with doing this piece for just with just three people Clementine had a brilliant idea of bringing her loop pedal Yeah, what we do with this piece is There's this whole slew of extended techniques inside and outside of the piano To demonstrate acoustic to demonstrate anthropogenic sound To treat the spectrograms that we just saw as sheet music to play these whale songs all the while Peter is doing some really brilliant and sound spatialization around y'all. We have a surround sound eight channels set up around y'all And that's not just for cool effects. Well, it's great. It's for an immersive experience, but also Distance and proximity to sound is so important in this realm And so yeah, I'll just seen a little glimpse of sort of the the academic practice I got I'm trying to get going on and I'm I've been developing this creative practice with these folks and is Here we are Okay, I think I might get some water An atmospheric association so that was actually rice's whales calls. I'm very hearing as well as all anthropogenic sound from On check we still got time for the little performance lab or what's our kind of life? Okay Okay A lot of So this is Then I'm also using my breath reading in and out. It's like slight whistled No, no, I can hold it. Is it better now? Can you hear me? Okay, so with your hand would you come come over here? Can you do some like tonal breathing? Yeah, exactly now Yeah, yeah Yeah, so kind of what I'm doing with that is I'm like My baseline is like a low slow kind of I'm picturing the tide like pulling back right and then as the waves crash you can kind of imagine the rhythm put yourself on the beach and Leave it flat and just with your fingertips Yeah, and then you can make a big swell. Yeah, here's what I want to do. I want to set a loop Part of the reason this is so difficult is because we have to keep the mic super hot the sounds are really delicate Get your face Now we have an ocean so that's a little big hand for Dr. Vera Okay, then we we've got some Anthropogenic sounds that start to come in so we've been calling them spectral sweeps. I want you to take this Stand over there I'm not being too bossy am I Okay, so on these low strings just kind of drag it slowly Push hard Hear that that's like a I Think of like some sort of industrial thing something you don't want happening like where you live probably Awesome. Keep doing that Show us your bowing chops It's like the oil industry is right here in the room with us, isn't it? Dr. Vera Raghavan, can I interest you in doing some seismic studies underneath the piano? All right, so You're gonna crawl under there. Yeah And so I'm using yeah that one in the timpani mallet as well grab it With one hand you're gonna smack just this part of the mallet against the top And then the timpani mallet hold up up and down and you're gonna kind of stab you do it the same time really hard Don't worry about hurrying the piano to go really really hard Yeah, and that could kill a whale It's really sad Again again on the next one stop on the next one stop One more time. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was great. Oh, yeah, I forgot about the whale so Every piano is different when we're doing when we were Rehearsing we didn't have this space who were working on a different piano and some of the techniques. They don't carry over It can be really challenging trying to compose a piece That's so I've never worked on something. That's so Instrument specific as this and so some of the mallets don't make the same sounds on different pianos We're lucky to have a lot of really beautiful grand pianos at Tulane But these spectrograms I was kind of Treating them like sheet music as Diane was saying so This is a two-and-thing There's the kind of D. I'm kind of going for like a D quarter strap. It it's hard. It's a friction now it so Swoops down It's really fun to work on this I've had an awesome time doing it I Was trying to get it actually Here the sound that the sound that I came in first with This isn't my preferred mallet to use but I tend to drop things I Try to get I've been struggling with the sound today So the long tone and then in the the sweeps just the beginning of this kind of work both in terms of This realm of music making we have another piece called exit seven and then hopefully more but also big dreams around Big way. Yeah. All right. Thank you and to me word for our last segment of the evening will present Information and context about the piece that was playing when we came in this evening and that will be playing when when We move on and we I want to go ahead right now and invite you to a reception that's going to follow Demi's comments and piece and I just thank everyone for coming to this evening and this celebration of the anthroposonic series and the long and Evolving history of music and sound here at Tulane and with the Center for the Gulf South Thank You Corey Diane Clementine and Peter that was I always love listening to that piece so When Rebecca and Denise invited me on the kayaking trip in Lili Bayou I was thinking a lot about Field recording and using Those raw recordings as like a basis for sound now The thing about field recording is it's different than recording in the studio Obviously, everything was a lot muddier and in the process of like processing all these all these clips I Was kind of going back and forth between my Understanding and kind of training for like purity and sound Which Given like the the tools and like what I had Didn't really seem possible and instead I decided to lean into the muddiness lean into This kind of like Underground noisy Feel that all these clips had and it brought me to thoughts of the subaltern the subterranean And inform the way that I process the clips and also how I Used the voice as another instrument. I was thinking a lot about Um Citizenship from below. It's a concept that I've been talking a lot about in my black diaspora culture class And wanted to think instead about what like a revolution from below would sound like what it would feel like What does protest from below sound like what did feel like and how those things? The voices that we've heard the things that we remember And the things that resonate with us how they carry on through time even though you might might not be able to Individually piece up piece back to like, you know, like your grandmother told you this specific thing Which you've actually heard it from like five different people this idea of overlapping voices Telling you the same thing over and over and over again Was really powerful to me and I really wanted to focus on on that particular understanding I Ended up using the The legend the local legend of Brock who pay as a kind of like launching point to think about the subaltern And think about revolution from below and his relationship Mythologically to the swamp as a site that like I was field recording and then thinking about okay Well, like I'm talking about the swamp here or this the stories about the swamp What does the swamp sound like? Yeah, so That's that's what was going through my head For this work in progress And I hope you all have enjoyed anthroposonic so far and Let's take a little listen. Shall we? All right again, thank you everyone for coming this evening and being with us. We hope that this Listening experience and gathering invites us all to consider not only our music and sounds made during the colonial period through today, but also the longer indigenous timeline that stretches beyond those barriers and also our geological timeline and sounds Have been in existence in this place. Please join us for a reception outside to celebrate these gorgeous artists Who've come together and I also just want to point out this area of incredible faculty members that have been mentioned tonight We're so glad And we know it's into this semester Yeah, so enjoy