499

Teaching soundscapes in the Brazilian Pantanal: Benefits of integrating music and science education Ethan A. Shirley, Alexander J. Carney, & Murilo Alves Pereira

Juara Foundation, University of Rochester (US) Juara Foundation, University of Michigan (US) Instituto Ciranda de Música e Cidadania (Brazil)

Abstract Musical training naturally introduces students to physical properties of sound such as frequency and amplitude as they learn how to control pitch, tone, and volume. This connection between music and science, however, is much more profound than might be apparent. The same ear training and audial-interpretive methods musicians employ to understand and create music are fundamental to modern, technologically advanced scientific studies that seek to better understand our environment by listening to it. We built a field course for musicians that integrates music education with the physics of waves and ecological cycles, taught at a scientific research station with instruction from professionals in diverse fields. Here, we detail the curriculum we use to teach so-called “core” subjects of biology and physics through music. Our program emphasizes the soundscape concept—a realization that all sound can be viewed as music. This approach allows exploration of how multiple sounds come together to form the world we perceive around us, producing mashes of different timbres and melodies whose complexity can be interpreted altogether or parsed apart. Through a survey with open response questions, we demonstrate some of the musical and scientific lessons learned by students. We then discuss the benefits of such a program that extend beyond the purely pedagogical: integration of music into core subjects improves music and science education, as well as providing opportunity for more data collection and processing for research and improving the accessibility of contemporary techniques and compositions. More broadly, this type of combined program builds up the arts as an important part of science, nature, and culture, rather than a secondary, non-scholastic pursuit. Keywords: Birdsong, composition, improvisation, contemporary techniques, nature

Introduction Music and nature have a deep, intimate connection. For thousands of years, human cultures have used the sounds of nature in their stories, songs, and rituals (Gray et al., 2001). Modern musicians and composers have continued this tradition. Beethoven employed the melodies of the songs of the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo in the score for the second movement of his Symphony No. 6 and alluded to other natural sounds like thunder elsewhere. Respighi’s Pines of Rome includes a recorded nightingale in the first-ever use of recorded sound in a major classical work (Ferguson, 1968). At varying levels of abstraction (Cross, 2005), sounds of nature manifest themselves in music to the extent that it is impossible to imagine music without them.

Recently, turning a musical ear to nature has evolved from using natural sounds to inspire musical composition into the more formal and scientific study of soundscapes.

500

According to John Cage, who in addition to his musical achievements once made his living collecting mushrooms: “Music is sounds, sounds around us whether we’re in or out of concert halls” (Schafer, 1994). R. Murray Schafer, one of the pioneers of the field, instructs us to listen to everything, from that traditionally called music to that considered noise, and to take all of this into consideration in a new definition of music. The entire world can be thought of as one enormous collaborative composition, and we all inherently navigate it as musicians, contributing our own sounds, and interpreting meaning in the ways we relate to the sounds around us (Schafer, 1994).

The study of soundscapes represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of sound and music. Harnessing the power of this fundamental definitional change, we set out to build a program around music and the sounds of nature. This program is simultaneously artistic and scientific. In Shirley et al. (2018), we described an early version of this program and explored its potential to change environmental attitudes through music pedagogy. Here, we describe the explicit use of soundscapes and music to teach core scientific principles of ecology and physics. We discuss how both science and music education can benefit greatly from a synergistic pedagogy combining the two.

Science-music combined curriculum and assessment methods The program we describe here is designed to teach music and nature with soundscapes in the Brazilian Pantanal, a conservation hotspot (Junk et al., 2005). The goals of this program were (1) to teach basic theme and variation in composition and improvisation using natural sounds; (2) to teach ecology, which is largely based on cycles that can be viewed as oscillating waves, by learning to identify birdsong in the field and individual animals and their roles in nature; (3) to teach the physics of waves and waveforms, culminating in understanding soundscape spectrograms and perception of biological features and meaning in the soundscape. These goals were accomplished through a curriculum that involved classroom lessons with activities as well as extended field experiences. Specific details of the sequence of activities in and out of the classroom are described in Table 1.

Activity/Lesson Learning Goals Brief Description

Nature in music Recognize some of the many ways nature

inspires music.

Listen to and view scores of nature-related music, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Prokofiev’s

Peter and the Wolf, Villa Lobos’s Uirapuru.

Listening to nature Begin thinking about soundscapes, distinguish biophony, geophony, and anthrophony (Pijanowski

et al, 2011).

Quietly listening for 20–30 minutes at a single location in nature. This is repeated several times at

different locations and different times of day throughout the program.

Ecology and cycles Demonstrate interaction between different species

and their environment often follows cyclical

patterns.

A classroom lesson covering different modes of species interaction and population models, followed by a version of tag that simulates

predator-prey population cycles.

501

Physics of sound Connect musical features like pitch, rhythm, and

timbre to physical properties of waves,

understand a spectrogram.

Classroom lesson on waves. Live demonstrations using recording software to display waveforms and

spectrograms of students playing different instruments and soundscape recordings.

Composition Experiment with new sounds and techniques, think creatively about what was heard and

learned.

Classroom lesson demonstrating some extended playing techniques and contemporary music

notation techniques, followed by experimentation and transcription time with instruments out in the

field.

Performance Tie field listening and ensemble listening

together, express and communicate new ideas.

Students rehearse then perform a short semi-improvised concert in nature, incorporating and

reacting to the sounds around them.

Review Review previous lessons, recognize how these

concepts did or did not manifest themselves in

the performance.

Listen to performance recording, identify features in its spectrogram. View nature and wildlife

pictures, compare their actual sounds to student interpretations. Discuss the whole experience.

Table 1. Description of pedagogical activities of the Pantanal Aventura Sonora program with soundscapes physics and ecology.

A group of 18 students, aged 12 to 18, with 6 music teachers went to a biological field station in the heart of the Brazilian Pantanal, some five hours drive by dirt road from the nearest city and on the side of a river where jaguars and other animals are commonly sighted. The group spent four days studying the nature of the area with local biologists and naturalist guides, doing listening exercises, and learning scientific principles. The field portion of the program was followed by a survey that allowed participants to reflect on their experience with open-ended questions. Children’s responses were collected as part of the class, and the use of their responses was duly approved by parents or guardians. The course was subject to a news article and short video, and music composed during the field course was later performed as part of a youth orchestra concert series.

Pedagogical results The essence of our program was to explore soundscapes, music, and nature on three levels. First, we sought to teach complex techniques, composition and improvisation. Second, we taught about ecology through individual animals and their contributions to the natural community. Third, we explored how all individual sounds meld together into soundscapes, whose physics and complexity allow for study of the community as a whole, rather than just its individual parts. Some of these results are described in Fig. 1.

502

Fig. 1. (A) A plumbeous ibis (Theristicus caerulescens) in the Brazilian Pantanal. (B) A bassoonist

transcribes ideas for several different bird imitations. (C) A spectrogram showing the plumbeous ibis call (dotted boxes) and student imitation using a bassoon mouthpiece (solid boxes).

Students developed listening, composition, and improvisation skills from the field

experience, which they described in their own words. Students described that they now hear sound differently, and that the program helped in specific composition and improvisation skills. One student said that now they realize “that unconventional forms of playing my instrument are possible.” Another student described specific newfound confidence in playing harmonics and flutter-tonguing on a wind instrument. These skills represent specific musical pedagogical outcomes of the program.

Students also acquired newfound understanding of individual species of birds and mammals and the sounds they create through direct observation in the field. Students reported being able to identify many species of animals, many of which they did not previously know existed. One student described with pride the ability to replicate the sound of a common bird on a violin, saying also that now their hearing is trained to listen

503

for birdsong in ways it was not before. Another student described being newly conscientious of how “I influence the well-being of the animals, now that I know something about the jaguars and birds of the Pantanal.” This realization of the interconnectivity of humans and nature, as well as the various parts of nature and how they interact with each other, is fundamental to the third goal of the project.

Finally, students developed an understanding of frequency, amplitude, and complex waveforms, which contributed to an understanding of communities in nature as combinations of animals and the sounds they create. “Nature plays a perpetual symphony,” said one student. Another added that “everything is music, from silence to the drone of the mosquitoes.” Collectively, these observations point to a deeper and fuller understanding of nature and natural science, as well as music. Students also discussed that apparent disorder of natural sounds can actually be perceived as music, and that this disorderly noise can be useful not only for music, but also to understand “how biodiversity works” and to incentivize preservation of nature as a rich body of diverse sounds, not merely the individual animals that comprise it. Discussion of implications and future directions The pedagogical results of the Pantanal Sonora project have implications that extend beyond pure music pedagogy. We showed that students themselves recognize how the Pantanal Sonora project engaged them in learning about nature and science as well as music. Importantly, the program allows these connections to step out of the classroom into important modern directions in research and music creation. Our soundscape experience permits collecting data and conducting biological research, emphasizes the importance of music to core science curriculum, and renders accessible contemporary music in ways that otherwise might not be possible.

Soundscape ecology is an exciting, fast-growing field that recognizes the vast and valuable data potential in listening to nature. Modern data-driven research involves collecting many thousands of hours of high-quality audio (Towsey, 2014). This can be done cheaply and easily with modern recording and storage technology, but the challenge then becomes analyzing data, which can add up to years of constant listening time for a single researcher. Distributing the work among many researchers and assistants can ameliorate the problem somewhat, but enlisting computer assistance is much more efficient. At the cutting edge, researchers employ large computing clusters and machine learning algorithms to sift through data highlighting important features and patterns. But rather than exclude musicians from this work, the turn to advanced technology emphasizes the fundamental ties between soundscape ecology research and music.

Parsing hours of natural recordings into species counts or indices of biodiversity is ultimately a question of musical analysis: given one large piece of sonic information, how can we break it down into distinct sources, describe its organization and patterns at multiple scales, and finally compare it to other pieces? This is no less true in practice. Musicians have developed deep learning and artificial intelligence models for problems such as instrument identification (Lostanlen & Cella, 2017), chord estimation (McVicar et. al., 2014), and music segmentation (Jensen, 2006), and these same algorithms are adapted to parse ecological data from field recordings (Towsey et. al., 2014). In the soundscape school of thought, a chord consisting of a flowing river in the bass, a macaw

504

call in the treble, and crickets above that is no less musically valid than a C, E, and G on the piano.

This inexorable musical connection extends to music and scientific education as well. Pantanal Sonora students succeeded at parsing meaning from a spectrogram because of their stronger academic inclination towards music. Explaining mathematically why one often sees stacked horizontal lines in a spectrogram requires deriving solutions to the wave equation, but music students immediately recognize these lines as overtone series. Music also prepares students to interpret and derive meaning from what they hear, a crucial part of the scientific process. This happens at both the immediate empirical level, such as connecting a change in animals’ sonic bandwidths over time to a change in the biodiversity of a place, as well as at the interpretive level, such as pointing to human activity (also present in the soundscape) as the cause, and thinking about how one might act differently to better preserve the environment around them.

The idea that studying music improves student performance in math and science (in addition to other fields) is not new, though a survey of the many studies of the phenomenon produces overall mixed results. Lack of a clear consensus is likely due to the complex nature of music and its impact on children’s cognitive, social, and emotional growth (Guhn, 2019). In the meantime, music continues to be underfunded and undervalued in schools as compared to so-called “academic” subjects (Major, 2012). Our program shows that the value of music can be demonstrated more directly. The structure of Pantanal Sonora does not only include both music and science together in the same program; it also allows students to be successful in difficult and unfamiliar science topics precisely through reliance on their musical skills and experience, all while practicing serious musical analysis, composition, and improvisation.

Soundscape-based music and interdisciplinary education is also inherently inclusive and supportive of diversity. As Schafer (1969) says, “behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the new musicians—anyone and anything that sounds!” The very nature of the soundscape framework means that one doesn’t need to be invited or qualified in some way to participate; we are all joint composers of the soundscape whether we realize it or not, and our only decision is whether to embrace this role we already hold. Our project included students from a variety of backgrounds: rural and urban, poor to middle class. The varied experience of each contributed to a broader group awareness of the soundscape. Thus, our methodology contributes to the literature that music can be a powerful tool of affirmation for diversity in education (Hoffman, 2012). Additionally, our students demonstrated new interest and ability in science, a field where access and performance still breaks sharply along demographic lines (Lee & Luykx, 2007).

Finally, we note the success of using contemporary playing techniques and notations in this program. This came naturally; the program included a brief lesson introducing contemporary music methods but allowed students to use whatever styles and techniques they desired. The majority of students then chose new techniques over or alongside more familiar, traditional techniques simply because they could better approximate and express many of the unpitched or non-Western-tonally-pitched sounds they were hearing. Since contemporary music was simply one of many means to this project and not a primary focus of our study, we have no conclusive results to present, but want to suggest that this would be a productive direction for further research. In studies

505

of orchestral programming, audiences prefer the standard repertoire on average (Pompe et. al., 2013) but non-standard repertoire can be included successfully in the right circumstances (Pierce, 2000; Pompe et. al. 2011). Our work suggests similarly that contemporary practice can be a larger, more productive part of music education than previously thought when presented in a natural soundscape setting. Conclusions Positive outcomes of a combined music and science program are neither surprising nor new. The Pantanal Sonora project builds on previous projects and capitalizes on rethinking the meaning of “music” that dates to over a half-century ago, and which is built on tenets of abstraction of natural sound that stretch back to the dawn of human time. Our program had three primary pedagogical goals: teaching (1) modern methods, composition, and improvisation; (2) ecology of animals in the Pantanal; and (3) the physics of waves, building soundscapes and understanding biodiversity with many sounds put together. Constructively engaging music students in an ecology-music combined curriculum allows students to learn new techniques, ecology, and physics, but also represents a means of enriching scientific research and core science curricula. By collecting and organizing data through the educational program, students actively participate in and contribute to the scientific research process, supplementing existing biological data with soundscapes that can help long-term understanding of changes in biodiversity. Finally, this program generates interest in both core scientific principles and music in ways that might not be possible if music and science are taught separately. In an era when music education is viewed more and more as a superfluous pastime, we hope that programs like this can highlight its intrinsic and extrinsic value to education, science, and culture in the world as a whole.

References

Cross, I. (2005). Music and meaning, ambiguity. Musical communication, 27. Ferguson, D. N. (1968). Masterworks of the Orchestral Repertoire: A Guide for

Listeners. University of Minnesota Press. Gray, P. M., Krause, B., Atema, J., Payne, R., Krumhansl, C., & Baptista, L. (2001). The

music of nature and the nature of music. Science, 291(5501), 52-54. Guhn, M., Emerson, S. D., & Gouzouasis, P. (2019). A population-level analysis of

associations between school music participation and academic achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology.

Hoffman, A. R. (2012). Performing our world: Affirming cultural diversity through music education. Music Educators Journal, 98(4), 61-65.

Jensen, K. (2007). Multiple scale music segmentation using rhythm, timbre, and harmony. EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, 2007(1), 159-159.

Junk, W. J., & de Cunha, C. N. (2005). Pantanal: a large South American wetland at a crossroads. Ecological Engineering, 24(4), 391-401.

Lee, O., & Luykx, A. (2007). Science education and student diversity: Race/ethnicity, language, culture, and socioeconomic status. Handbook of research on science education, 1, 171-197.

506

Lostanlen, V., & Cella, C. E. (2016). Deep convolutional networks on the pitch spiral for musical instrument recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.06644.

Major, M. L. (2013). How they decide: A case study examining the decision-making process for keeping or cutting music in a K–12 public school district. Journal of Research in Music Education, 61, 5–25.

McVicar, M., Santos-Rodriguez, R., Ni, Y., and Bie, T. D. (2014). Automatic chord estimation from audio: a review of the state of the art. IEEE Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. 22, 556–575.

Pierce, J. L. (2000). Programmatic risk-taking by American opera companies. Journal of Cultural Economics, 24(1), 45-63.

Pijanowski, B.C., Farina, A., Gage, S.H. et al. What is soundscape ecology? An introduction and overview of an emerging new science. Landscape Ecol (2011) 26: 1213.

Pompe, J., Tamburri, L., & Munn, J. (2011). Factors that influence programming decisions of US symphony orchestras. Journal of Cultural Economics, 35(3), 167.

Pompe, J., Tamburri, L., & Munn, J. (2013). Symphony concert demand: Does programming matter?. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 43(4), 215-228.

Schafer, R. M. (1969). The new soundscape. Don Mills: BMI Canada Limited. Schafer R. M. (1994). The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the

world. Destiny Books, Rochester, VT. Shirley, E. A., Carney, A., Hannaford, C., & Ewing, G. (2018). Using music to teach

ecology and conservation: A pedagogical case study from the Brazilian Pantanal. In D. Forrest (Ed.), Proceedings of the International Society for Music Education (pp. 173–180). Baku, Azerbaijan.

Towsey, M., Wimmer, J., Williamson, I., & Roe, P. (2014). The use of acoustic indices to determine avian species richness in audio-recordings of the environment. Ecological Informatics, 21, 110-119.