Melissa Ruszczyk was immersed in her research at the University of Miami, using high-speed video cameras to investigate how baby corals swim, when she began to think about how she could interest others in the field.
She saw some parallels between how these nascent corals move through the water, and the way she viewed musical notes as she played the clarinet. Ruszczyk then wondered, could they take this data about how corals swim, and create a musical composition from it?
Days later, Ruszczyk, a post-doctoral researcher, shared the idea with her advisor, Vivek Prakash, assistant professor of physics, and his collaborators, Prannoy Suraneni, associate professor of civil and architectural engineering, and Erotokritos Skordilis, lecturer in business technology.
"Translating science by using music as a medium can take away the intimidation factor that a lot of people feel about science, or physics in particular," said Ruszczyk, who studied music and biology during her undergraduate years and now plays clarinet with the Greater Miami Symphonic Band.
Sonification is the practice of assigning musical notes, pitches, or tones to data points. It is something Ruszczyk has wanted to integrate into her research since she worked to sonify aquatic fly larvae behavior patterns in her undergraduate thesis.
"Sonification is a really interesting and different way to communicate what could be another graph," Ruszczyk said. "By stimulating different senses than just our sight, we can pick up on different trends in the data that we might not notice using traditional techniques."
With support from a collaborative University Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge (U-LINK) grant, she reached out to see if anyone in the Frost School of Music would be interested in sonifying the coral larvae swimming trajectories. Days later, associate professor Dorothy Hindman said she had a graduate student interested.
Soon after, Frost graduate student Indigo Knecht created a composition from the baby coral data and garnered a grant from the Presser Foundation to support their dissertation work. Knecht is creating an interactive exhibition featuring audio and sculptural pieces of the coral data, which will be displayed next fall inside the Ashe Administration Building.
Last fall, Ruszczyk and Knecht presented their work at the Frost School of Music, inspiring four more student composers to join the project. With the influx of composers working on the same dataset, Ruszczyk and Knecht began organizing a concert to highlight the works. Each piece was unique to the composer, utilizing electronic composing tools, along with flute, saxophone, vibraphone, and a synthesizer.
"This was an extremely fascinating piece to create," Knecht said. "It's also part of a growing and prominent field called eco-musicology. A lot of composers are very interested in nature, so you see some crossover in these fields."
Both Knecht and Ruszczyk were pleased with the concert turnout inside St. Bede Episcopal Church on campus recently. It included their advisors, as well as musicians and anyone interested in seeing "Music from Science: Sonic explorations of coral larvae swimming data."
Before starting her doctorate at the Frost School, Knecht had experience sonifying carbon dioxide emissions data, as well as composing a piece about human interaction with the environment. Because Knecht loves using numbers, they are a regular part of her composition process.
"Sonification is great for spreading environmental awareness," said Knecht, who is using the coral composition as part of her dissertation. "I'd love to encourage people interested in music and science to get involved in sonification—it's a great way to bridge those two worlds."
As water temperatures continue to warm across the globe, they often cause coral bleaching events that are threatening the existence of reefs as major underwater ecosystems. Yet, corals reproduce by spawning once or twice a year.
Ruszczyk's work aims to understand how tiny, fertilized coral larvae travel through the ocean before landing on either a reef system, or on a different type of substrate on the sea floor, where they can grow and multiply. She used two different types of brain coral larvae for the datasets, obtained from collaborators at the Rosenstiel School, SECORE International, and The Florida Aquarium.
By studying how coral larvae swim, it may help scientists to better understand how corals develop, Ruszczyk said. It may also allow other researchers to devise ways to protect them.
"Overall, this has been a really rewarding process throughout the past two years," Ruszczyk said. "It's often hard to walk the line between these two fields, but I really hope people left the concert thinking about science, corals, and music in a new way."
