Can Computer Music Save the Earth?

Abstract A computer musician composing in the age of climate change will benefit from considering the state of the earth today, and the interaction of music and nature. I discuss a dual approach incorporating music and science in my works which are often shaped by natural sound, environmental concerns, stochastic processes and algorithms.

Keywords computer music, electroacoustic music, nature, stochastic, algorithmic music, environmental music.

Can computer music save the earth? It might seem to be a silly question at first. How can music, an art form, save anything, except perhaps our emotional states, through peaceful or joyful engagement with sound? Does creating or listening to music have an impact beyond the personal, emotional and occasionally informative aspects? Even if music can induce a listener to be motivated to work for changes in environmental policy, would our community of listeners be large enough to implement these changes? Is there a potential for reaching out and changing minds of significant numbers of people? Whatever the answers to these questions are, the reality is, according to recent studies, that the state of the earth appears to be currently at a tipping point. Without strong actions in the near future, we are facing predictions of a hot, miserable and dangerous future.

  What is the State of the Earth?

On September 28, 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it has determined that twenty-three new species are now extinct. This includes a fish, the Scioto madtom, last seen the year I was born in my state of Ohio. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland comments in this report on “climate change and natural area loss push-ing more and more species to the brink”. (Hires 2021) While diminishing biological diversity is an indirect threat to human life, even more alarming information is found in a report released by the United Nation’s Intergovernmen-tal Panel on Climate Change in August 2021, stating that green house emissions from human activity will even in the best case scenario, continue to warm the planet for at least thirty more years, causing increased heat waves, wildfires, floods, downpours, and droughts. Global sea levels will rise for 2,000 more years. Change is happening more and more rapidly, and there is only a narrow win-dow in which cutting emissions could still effectively limit the most severe implications for the future. (Fountain 2021) Many of you or your children may be alive in the second half of this century, and will experience whatever we are able to accomplish in limiting climate change and preserving a habitable and beautiful environment. Without decisive action, however, catastrophic consequences will follow. I believe that those of us with the education to understand the problem must take action, listen to the scientists, and find solutions.

In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the character Emily realizes after her death, “Oh Earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?” While Emily was talking about moments of family experi-ences that humans pass through, blind to the nuances, the same is true of our relationship with nature. How else could we have come to the point of irrevocably unbalanc-ing our own life-sustaining environment?

Technological Impact on the Environment

Manufacturing computers has a negative environmental impact from the energy and chemicals used, and those of us who use computers to create music might consider this. Finding ways to prolong the life of these tools, such using a computer for additional time could reduce this impact.

Sound has also been used in medical devices in ways that may actually be harmful. When visiting my mother in the hospital in 2012, I noticed how the machines monitoring patients’ physical states tended to emit repetitive beeps that often clashed with other device’s sounds. These alarms were intended to be noticeable so that the patient received better care, but the result was distressing. These beeps are generally simple on and off events, unchanging in frequency, timbre, amplitude and rhythm. I wondered how the ill could possibly relax enough to sleep well and heal, with the noise of these beeps. Recently researchers have worked to make these sounds more natural and less stressful using whistling and singing sounds. (Rueb 2019)

  Nature-based Works

My dual interests in music and science lead me to elec-tronic and computer music in the first place, and many pieces involve natural sound, sound environments or scientific concepts from nature. The pieces I have created that relate most clearly to nature are generally in one or more of four categories: 1, based on natural sound, data or images, 2, use instruments to create sound related to natural sound, 3, use algorithms that have some connec-tion to a natural process, or 4, pieces designed as warn-ings against environmental problems.

Works Based on Natural Sound or Data

Nature has provided materials for many of my works.

Early electronic works include Occurrents (1986), an ana-log magnetic tape piece based on water sounds, created at the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios. Later when I was studying for my D.M.A. at Columbia Uni-versity, my brother gave me a recording of Humpback whale sounds. I digitized the sounds and created a com-puter music piece “Whalesong.” Both of these pieces were based on recorded natural sound.

Sound 1. Excerpt of Whalesong (1989) by Mara Helmuth.

Bird sounds have inspired a number of my pieces. Charyl Kneevers (Zehfus) created a beautiful song about endan-gered species entitled Star Geese (1987), and I added an electronic track of geese-like sounds.

In 1997 I composed Abandoned Lake in Maine (Helmuth 2007), a stereo fixed format piece. Traveling in Wisconsin, I found a compact disk with recorded loon sounds. Upon listening I remembered hearing these sounds as a child on family vacations in the north woods, on Whitefish Lake, near Hayward. I created the piece with loon sounds using my granular sampling programs, which I will discuss in the section on algorithms. There were four very distinct orig-inal loon sounds: the hoot, the yodel, the tremolo and the call, which is heard at the beginning of Sound 2. The call and the tremolo were most conducive to creating varied textures so I tended to experiment with processing more with these sounds. In this excerpt unprocessed natural sound is heard at the beginning and end, and altered sound is in the middle.

Sound 2. Excerpt of Abandoned Lake in Maine (1997) by Mara Helmuth.

This piece alternated between natural sound segments and processed sound. I found the transitions from natural to processed sound to be easy to manage, but the transi-tions from the processed sound back to natural sound had to be handled extremely carefully to avoid awkward-ness. I attributed this unexpected difference in percep-tion to aural expectations regarding natural sound. It is not unusual to hear natural sound transformed in movies, TV or other computer music pieces. Natural soundscapes might change gradually into transformed sound worlds. Returning, however, to a totally realistic sound environ-ment in my piece required some disruption of the sense of digital media, a knock or scrape to make the abrupt change work, or a very gradual return from a processed sound into something that resembles a natural sound, to allow the listener to realign with the pure natural sound-scape again. For example, I used a windy noisy transfor-mation to easy back into the natural soundscape at the end of Sound 1. Original soundscape recordings often have several layers, such as wind noise, crickets, and loon calls, and expectations about what is in each layer and the amplitude relationships between layers, once heard, are strong. If just one layer is primarily transformed, to return to all three layers suddenly can seem jarring. Working with a return to the original soundscape after extreme alterations of natural sound can pose compositional chal-lenges. This may point to the importance of natural sound being heard as authentic, even in a context of a computer music composition where processing can be conspicuous and necessary.

This piece was overtly political in that samples of a natu-ralist’s voice were processed, as were some storm-like sounds, to create a climax warning of the threat to the natural environment of the loon.

Loonspace (Helmuth 2000) was created for Allen Otte and the Percussion Group Cincinnati, using the mainly the loon material from the previous piece. An algorithmic percussion score for unspecified instruments generated by a C program was interpreted by the group. The instru-mentalists’ convincing choices of compatible instruments and playing techniques determined the success of this piece. The acoustic instruments created bird-like sounds and other nature sounds. This piece was more a sonic environment, than a composition.

Rock Music was a sonification based on Matanuska glacier data. A geologist friend, Teresa Davis, spent much of her summer in 2004 in Alaska measuring lake sediment data. When she mentioned “grain frequencies” and other de-scriptions of lake sediment which sounded similar to granular synthesis parameters, I decided to map her data into some synthesis programs. The resulting project could only be called “Rock Music” and probably because the dual scientific/artistic approach, was particularly satisfying. The challenge here was to finding expressive and evoca-tive mappings between data and sound parameters. The potential of this technique is promising for the future, with other types of data.

Works with Instruments or Voice Based on Nature

Rippling, a fully improvised work, was a piece I created in 2000 for Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening Retreat in Hal-iburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve, in Ontario, Canada. This week-long series of deep listening sessions in nature involved many singers, and much of the work we did in-cluded vocal improvisation. Rippling was a score consist-ing of wavy, rippling lines, meant to inspire people canoe-ing in a lake to interact sonically to create a musical expe-rience. Inspired by Oliveros, the work is for either musi-cians or non-musicians. The performance of mostly voices also included the sounds of paddles in water and boats.

The Birds: An opportunity came up in the CCM composi-tion department to create a score for Concert Nova en-semble and the Cincinnati Ballet. Each person took one movement from The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns, and I chose “The Birds.” I analyzed various bird samples with spectrograms, attempted to notate these sounds for acoustic string and wind instruments, and wrote a short score based on these sounds with elec-tronics.

Water Birds was a collaborative work originally created with clarinetist Rebecca Danard for clarinet, wireless sen-sor network system and electronics. The wireless sensor network system and music project was a collaboration with the Computer Science department at UC. The struc-tured improvisation used infrared sensor data from the location of the performer moving onstage to turn on or off layers of spectral delays with rtcmix~ in Max. For the score I notated fragments of music that the performer can manipulate freely. Segments of the performer’s per-formance is recorded and played back with the spectral delay. Many timing aspects are under the performer’s control. After the piece was developed, we dispensed with the sensor system, and I performed the piece taking performer location into account. The piece has been per-formed widely, and each performer has taken the piece in new directions, some with my fixed format electronic part resembling what the original patch creates. Several of the performers researched and added different bird calls to the piece. The most recent performance by An-drea Vos-Rochefort incorporates bird movements as well as sound, with a flute part performed by Elizabeth Darling. Allowing the performer to bring their own experience of nature into the piece augments the power of the piece.

Figure 2. Andrea Vos-Rochefort performing Water Birds, by Mara Helmuth. (video excerpt)

The butterfly has also inspired several works, although more by the symmetrical shape of its body and complex movements, than its sound. Butterfly Within for flute and fixed stereo audio was a reaction to a health crisis, and expressed my mercurial mental state at that time. The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped organ within one’s neck, and mine had a serious disease in 2006. The possibility of a one’s life being threatened makes daily experience seem much more intense and appreciated, and the quick movements of the butterfly embodied my changing emo-tions.

The flute lines range between the volatile and the serene. I algorithmically generated gestures and textures from sounds of physical models of gritty shakers and dense blowbottle layers in RTcmix to interact with the flute part, which is sometimes submerged, and sometimes emerging with fervor.

Butterfly mirrors is a structured improvisation for varying ensembles of acoustic instruments and live electronics. The score and electronic parts are related to those of Water Birds, but after a first performance by the Tornado Project, the piece was expanded for a larger ensemble, Esther Lamneck’s New Music Ensemble at New York Uni-versity. It was first performed by these 17 instrumentalists, including electric guitar, with live electronics and a spe-cial projected video of fire. The title here refers to the motivic interactions between improvising players, who might invert material in a mirror-like fashion as they hear each other play the notated fragments. The butterfly con-cept is again a visual idea of a symmetrical structure, here influencing melodic development and improvised lines.

A magical moment occurred at the beginning of the piece, when the flutist began to improvise acoustically, and after a moment her sound was picked up by two iPads nearby held by two performers. The iPad performers moved the iPads gradually into range of the microphones, gradually beginning to send a layer of spectral delays into the sound system. When the other microphones subsequent-ly became live, the sound from various instruments was processed by computer and expanded sound textures with more layers of the spectral delays was sent into the speaker system. Other performances by smaller ensem-bles have been by Ensemble Pi, SoundProof and per-formers at CCM. Each time I work with new instruments, especially in the lower registers, I am astounded by some of the sounds the spectral delays can create, with the extremely long delay times I prefer.

Onsen: Hot Springs (2019) for vibraphone and fixed me-dia had several inspirations. The first was the performer, Joseph Van Hassel, who commissioned the piece. He sent me audio and video recordings of him playing on several outdoor metal sculptures at the University of North Caro-lina, Pembroke campus where he teaches. I used these samples in the piece, with granular sampling, convolution and other processing. The other more conceptual inspira-tion was from a visit to Japan, where I was able to visit Onsen, the hot springs near Tokyo. This beautiful setting, and bathing in mineral waters, rejuvenated my energy levels intensely for three days after the visit. The bubbling sounds and sensations, the shape of a bathtub with over-hanging trees, and the peaceful energy of the location influenced the piece.

Figure 3. Onsen. (Photo by Akira Takaoka.)

Sound 3a. Excerpt of ButterflyWithin by Mara Helmuth.

Sound 3b. Excerpt of Onsen: Hot Springs (2019) by Mara Helmuth.

Sound Environments Worldwide

My interest in working with natural sound became more urgent, as I explored other sound environments on dif-ferent continents, and concern about climate change increased. Travel experiences have been a compositional inspiration for the last two decades, and many of the ma-terials I have recorded have been in nature. I was aware of the changing cultures and climate and felt that the time frame for experiencing some aspects of nature might not be very long.

China in 1999 was the location of the International Com-puter Music Conference. Visiting Beijing rewakened an interest I had in Asian culture, and I resolved to return. I also met Josef Fung the conference director and director of an ensemble of traditional Chinese instrumentalists. At that point, Beijing was a sea of bicycles at big intersections, without many cars.

On sabbatical in spring of 2003, I visited several mountain parks in China and was in residence at the Sino-Nordic Arts Space (SNAS) in Beijing, directed by Fung. I recorded samples walking in three mountain parks: Hua Shan near Xi’an in Shaanxi Province, Emei Shan, near Cheng Du, one of the four Great Buddhist Mountains of China, and Huang Shan, in Anhui Province, known as China’s most beautiful mountain (Figure 4).

After these great walks I arrived in Shanghai, and the SARS epidemic was underway. I noticed the look of panic on the faces of people when I coughed, due to my aller-gies. I was advised to return home by friends, so my trip was interrupted. I was not allowed to enter Japan, the next planned visit. By the summer I was able to return to Beijing to create an installation work, Staircase of Light, in which a dancer on a stairway controls the sounds I had recorded in the parks, and their transformations. Photo-cells on each stair sent data into MaxMSP to play sounds. A related concert performance piece, China Prism, per-formed in Cincinnati, allowed the same sonic materials to be played by a dancer on a stage.

Figure 4. “Seeing is believing” view at Huang Shan. (Photo by Mara Helmuth)

I acquired a qin (or gu-qin), an ancient 7-stringed Chinese zither on this trip in China with the help of a student at the China Conservatory of Music, with which my school has an exchange. I studied this instrument around 2005 with a teacher in Pittsburgh, and I wrote several improvi-satory pieces for my own performance with electronics. While these pieces are not directly inspired by nature, some of characters for techniques in traditional qin nota-tion are based on nature images, and I found this inspiring for composition.

I returned to China in 2007 and did additional recording, this time visiting a remote Tibetan monastery in moun-tainous Yushu, in Qinghai province. I recorded services, monastery sounds, and purchased Tibetan instruments and other items. By the time of these later trips Beijing had changed tremendously, with some of the smaller streets no longer there, and traffic congestion with many cars was amplified.

The installation resulting from my Yushu experience was called Hidden Mountain and was presented in Beijing in audio form, in a room of SNAS with marble floors and an-cient Chinese furniture. At CCM Hidden Mountain was presented in the Cohen theater with audio, video and Tibetan instruments to be manipulated by participants.

They donned a scarf with an inlaid wireless sensor, and moved around the concert hall space which affected au-dio and video. In a darkened space defined by a Tibetan rug, a recording service was heard from a temple, in which people entered ecstatic states, playing cymbals and other temple instruments.

I also recorded in temples in Japan such as Ei Hei Ji and at Tamakura, and in Korea and still have many excellent re-cordings from various trips.

Uganda’s Teach and Tour Sojourners organization invited me to visit in 2011 for an experience which included teaching in various situations and recording on safari in the country’s parks, which are outstanding places to find wildlife. In addition to many other safari recording situa-tions, I spent about an hour with a pride of lions on the last day in Queen Elizabeth park.

Figure 5. With a pride of lions in Uganda.

I created an installation Sounds of Uganda for the Giraffe Park hotel where I had stayed, and where Stawa Universi-ty courses were taught. I also created a laptop ensemble piece from Uganda (2014) in MaxMSP with rtcmix~ for several performers, based on recorded sounds of birds, frogs, a river, and hippopotamuses. A video piece from safari footage in multi-channel format also exists.

In Australia in 2016 an another extraordinary sabbatical allowed me to record sound and video at the Great Barri-er Reef, the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, and at Uluru in the desert of the Northern Territory. My project was to investigate nature, the impact of humanity on the environment, and Aboriginal sustainable living, and rec-ord samples for composition projects. A sailing tour to an inner reef, boat tours to the outer reef, walks in the for-est, and hiking in the desert were a few of the opportuni-ties to experience and record nature. Parks are co-managed by the Aboriginal people and the government, and one might see signs as the one in Figure 8 encourag-ing one to enjoy the environment.

Figure 6. Still from video taken while snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef.

Figure 7. Mossman Gorge in the Daintree Rainforest.

Figure 8. A sign seen on the path at Uluru, Northwest Territory.

Figure 9. Hiking in King’s Canyon, Watarrka National Park, Northern Territory.

from Australia, a laptop ensemble piece with an expand-ed set of sounds, was one result of this unforgettable trip. In this piece there is a series of sections, which defines what categories of sounds are be drawn from. Sections are 1) water snorkeling sounds, 2) rain, 3) birds, 4) water rushing, 5) digeridoo, and 6) birds. The performer can also choose to process the sounds with RTcmix instru-ments for granular sampling, comb filters and a sweeping filter. An iPad, including its orientation data, may be used to control Max on the laptop. Intense listening is neces-sary as in any musical performance, and I advise the per-formers to spend periods of time listening to what others are playing, and then respond to the sounds. Processing is used sparingly to highlight the natural sound. Sharing the sounds I collected in this piece so that musicians can shape sound events together, was special way of honor-ing the natural sound environments and allowing others to interact with them.

Figure 10. from Australia Max patch.

Sound 4. Excerpt of from Australia (2016) by Mara Helmuth.

After the Australia trip, I conceived of a Sonic Refuges project, with a concept of creating sonic refuge spaces for one to experience nature, or nature-influenced sonic environments.

Using Algorithms Connected to Nature

Composition micro-level and macro-level algorithms have also allowed me to create structures that have various relationships with nature.

Islands (1988) was an algorithmic piece with a C-program generated CSound score. The program created a struc-ture of grouped frequency modulation sound events with with complex envelopes. The piece was named by Brad Garton, my teacher at Columbia, who said the sounds re-minded him of islands as he drove home through the night New Jersey fog. While I had approached the compo-sition abstractly, with a four-level logical process to gen-erate materials of various types, the results sounded analogous to a sonification of geological formations.

Granular synthesis first caught my attention in the next year, inspired by Barry Truax’s Riverrun and the formal-ized music of Iannis Xenakis. I created several instruments in the Cmix music programming language that would cre-ate gestural stochastic granular phrases, either by synthe-sis or granular sampling. The first piece I did with the syn-thesis instrument was called Song for Earth Day, as I found myself finishing the piece in the Columbia studio around Earth Day, 1990. While I was unable to take part in Earth Day events, I was delighted to create some natural sound-ing thunder and water sounds using the stochastic pa-rameters of my new instrument. The complexity of the probability-controlled grain parameters approaches the complexity of situations in nature, such as river water rushing against uneven rocks.

Sound 5. Excerpt of For Earth Day (1990) by Mara Helmuth.

Extensions of these granular synthesis programs have allowed me to continue to create diverse sound worlds in many of my pieces in different genres. When processing the sounds of instruments, as well as in synthesis, the qualities of the resulting sounds are different from tradi-tional musical phrases in that gradual changes, types of transformations and gestures tend to be more important than patterns of pitches, melodies, harmonies, or metrical structures. The timbral gestures in my granular synthesis works may have more commonalities with natural sound, even if not created from natural sound samples. This as-pect may also free the music from some expectations listeners could have with instrumental music.

Environmental warning pieces include the previously mentioned Abandoned Lake in Maine with the threaten-ing climax warning of habitat loss. All Alarms Sounding (2017) was written for two pianos and electronics. In 2016 I had spent several days snorkeling in the outer and inner reefs of the Great Barrier Reef near Port Douglas and Shute Harbour, Queensland. This reef is the world’s largest organism, and full of fascinating features and fish. In the year of my visit, however, 22% of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef died because the ocean temperature was too warm. A person in Queensland told me that his shoes melt on the street in summer. The sense of urgency about the degrading environmental situation triggered alarms in my mind as well as in the news. Program notes for this work read, “Alarms go off every year, every month, about the consequences of climate change…. Complex systems like the reef, the rainforest and the mangroves evolved over millennia to coexist, the wildlife in an intricate bal-ance with their environment. Fast changes are not some-thing that can be easily accommodated by evolution. Something may survive future climate change, but it may not be us, or life as we know it.”

I had resolved by this point to make environmental awareness a primary focus of my work.

Endangered Sound is a piece created for network per-formance using RTcmix on Internet2 for the Network Mu-sic Conference at Stony Brook University in 2018. Each performer was instructed to find sounds they considered “endangered”, such as that of a threatened species. Sounds were exchanged between remote locations of CCM in Cincinnati and Stony Brook University, NY. As I have found in previous sound exchanges of this kind, the intense listening required with only audio connections, and no video, no visual cues between performers, actual-ly enhances the improvisational experience. Performers actually had trouble finding “endangered sound” from threatened species, and I ended up providing samples. Both of the above pieces highlight threats to our envi-ronment, and my intention was to increase awareness of these issues.

Collaborations with Esther Lamneck, virtuoso performer and also a composer who has co-composed several works with me. All of these pieces have extensive use of granu-lar synthesis algorithms which create gestural forms which are in my mind related to geological formations or the motions of wind and water. Her improvisatory and virtuosic performance is very compatible with these algo-rithmically generated sounds. Our first interactive work for the Hungarian tárogató wind instrument and live elec-tronics, Irresistible Flux, was based on an old folk song. Two more recent works are more directly based on envi-ronmental ideas. Breath of Water, for clarinet and stereo fixed media was influenced by the sight and sounds of a group of humpback whales I saw on a windy boat trip from Great Barrier Reef’s outer reef Opal Reef to Port Douglas, as well as Lamneck’s compelling subharmonic sounds. The two sets of sounds, whales and subharmonics, had unexpected commonalities that allowed them to be connected in the piece easily.

Sound 6. Excerpt of Breath of Water (2016) by Mara Helmuth and Esther Lamneck.

Sound Dunes (Helmuth 2019), a more recent collabora-tive composition, is based on tárogató phrases and my digital transformations, which we realized created dune-like sound structures with curving contours and granular textures. A new multichannel immersive version is scheduled to be premiered at the Sonorities Festival in Belfast, 2022.

Sound 7. Excerpt of Sound Dunes (2019) by Mara Helmuth and Esther Lamneck.

  “Space” Pieces: Apart or From Nature?

Several of my compositions seem at first to be almost op-posed to environmental music, coming from abstract ide-as of space. Of course, space is apart from earth, but not apart from a cosmic view of nature.

Dragon of the Nebula (Helmuth 2020) was written in 1992 in response to the Gulf War, and reminded me of an image of a galactic nebula. It was composed with the same granular synthesis instrument as Song for Earth Day, but has more precisely defined granular gestures, some with “metallic” sounds (grains with long durations in dense frequency bands) or noisy granular bands. While these sounds may seem to have little to do with nature, actually the opening noisy bands of sound smoothly descending can resemble wind-like phrases, while the fierce “metallic” dragon gestures might sound related to metal percussion sounds. Many of the sounds based on probabilities rising or falling in undulating or twisting patterns, emulate the movement of water or clouds.

Expanding Space, for tuba and computer was composed for my colleague Timothy Northcut, tubaist, based on a concept of the increasing space between people in the digital age, as well as the astronomical idea of expanding space. Again, while the original idea seems remote from life on earth, and the lengthy algorithmically mixed third and final section has an other-worldly feel, the acoustical realities of the magnificent F and C tubas, which were recorded in the underground CCM parking garage with a 10-second reverberation time, ground this piece in an earthly context.

Opening Spaces, which will be seen on the conference, is based on a Menger sponge fractal and realized in video with Blender and Unity. The structure is suspended in space, and becomes more complex as the viewer moves among various versions and parts of the fractal. While the idea is quite abstract, the sounds are made from RTcmix instruments based on physical models of acoustic instru-ments, a Helmholtz resonator (MBLOWBOTL()) usually in simple harmonic ratios, and a 2D Mesh instrument (MMESH2D()). Another aspect of the video which is influ-enced by nature is the particle systems which emits flecks of shininess that pass through the structure, in synchrony with the sounds. The opposition of the precisely config-ured abstract structure in space with the earthy quality of the original sounds, and the spontaneous movements of the particles, reminding one of snow or the fluffy wind-born seeds of trees gave me a surreal but surprisingly nurturing feeling.

Figures 11 a and b. Images from Opening Spaces (2019) by Mara Helmuth. (video excerpt – Opening Spaces)

  Looking Back and Ahead

This overview of my work reveals that attention to nature has frequently brought fresh insights and materials into my music. When reaching into the natural world I have not been disappointed by the creative paths that have opened before me. I think this is because I intuitively un-derstand how to relate to places on this earth. I am at-tuned to my home planet sounds, textures, skies, and bodies of water. Its life forms may seem exotic at times, but because they exist on earth, discovering them simply expands the knowledge of the story of our lives, the net-works of life in each niche of each ecosystem. Each trip has broadened my knowledge and experience of not only human cultures, but the context in which humans live, the other species which they eat, fear, avoid, enjoy or revere, and the earth’s structures making up the surrounding natural world.

Conservationist Rachel Carson writes in A sense of Won-der, “There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the mi-gration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infi-nitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.” Humans have evolved with these ecological rhythms and their patterns provide rich materials for art.

In my work, for each new bird call sample, there are hun-dreds of granular processings, or other transformations, a few of which might complete an expressive family of sounds for a piece. For every stochastic process, there are countless potential tweaks of the algorithm which will expand the sound world in new directions. For some of these sounds, it will be immediately apparent how to em-ploy them musically, while others will remain mysterious until I learn to understand their meaning, based on what I know from the natural and human-created world.

My original question, “Can Computer Music Save the Earth?” may best be answered by turning the question around: “Can the Earth Save Computer Music?” Over and over again I find I have drawn inspiration from natural sounds, data, concepts and algorithms. My most extended collaborative relationship is with nature. The sounds and scientific processes of earth inform, sustain, and enlight-en me in the composing process. These practices are an opportunity for focusing collective energy toward sustain-ing our earth environment.

Acknowledgments. My collaborators, mentors and friends have included Brad Garton, Doug Scott, and John Gibson in the RTcmix world, Pauline Oliveros and the deep listeners, Judy Klein, and Esther Lamneck. I would like to thank my teachers, colleagues, students and my family. I am also grateful for the opportunity to share my music and ideas in this KEAMS conference. Finally I want to express my appreciation for this beautiful earth, un-describably diverse, complex and exquisitely nurturing.

  References

Cage, J. (1981). For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. . London: Boyars.

Hires, B. (2021). U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Proposes Delist-ing 23 Species from the Endangered Species Act Due to Extinction. In U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. https://www.fws.gov/news/ShowNews.cfm?ref=u.s.-fish-and-wildlife-service-proposes-delisting-23-species-from-&_ID=37017 Retrieved September 29, 2021.

Fountain, H. (2021). 5 takeaways from the major new U.N. climate report. In New York Times. August 9. New York. Retrieved September 28, 2021.

Helmuth, M. (2007). Abandoned Lake in Maine. In Sound Collaborations. CDCM computer music series 36. CRC 2903. The composer in the computer age. XI. [CD]. Baton Rouge. LA: Centaur Records.

Helmuth, M. (2001). Loonspace. In Implements of Actuation, EMF 023 [CD]. Electronic Music Foundation.

Helmuth, M. (2020). Dragon of the Nebula. [streaming audio]. Soundcloud audio. 8:34. Posted Dec, 2020.
https://soundcloud.com/marahelmuth/dragon-of-the-nebula?si=877de992685248b0a572497206f80189