Bio + philia

How could one album spur me to totally rethink how we use music to communicate about our natural surroundings? Let me begin answering this question for myself by highlighting the fantastic timely coincidence of me discovering an album dedicated to nature during my first week living in the Adirondacks. 

Last summer, I interned for a rock music camp that focuses on an inspirational source each year. The 2015 inspirational focus was "Women and Rock", but when I looked at the list of songs that ensembles chose to perform, I was disappointed to see that artists like Joan Jett, Heart, Janis Joplin, and Blondie filled the concert program. Although I enjoyed much of this music, the fact that these singer/songwriters are such iconic as female artists today, while men continue to dominate the music industry in terms of production, songwriting, and instrumentation, inspired me to review my own favorite musicians and do some research about their role in the music business. And then I remembered: Ahh, Björk! I hadn't listened to her music in a few years, and I realized in that moment of remembering her how discouraging that is! In a fit of passion, I first listened to the songs from her early albums that I had fallen love with and overplayed during high school, possibly making me go on this undue break from her music. Just as I as a teenager had decided to try oatmeal again after having dinosaur eggs oatmeal each day for breakfast for years as a toddler, -- only to discover that since I had shunned oatmeal the stores had been selling apple and cinnamon, maple brown sugar, stawberry, blueberry, vanilla... all sorts of flavors of oatmeal!-- I was excited to listen to the new music Björk had released over the years. (I find it interesting that my obsession with Björk resurged at this point in my life, even if the sequence of events and thought processes that led me to check her out again intrigue no one but myself.)

Björk's 2011 album Biophilia was gorgeous to listen to, but I was not truly entranced by its magnitude until I watched a documentary on the making of the album just yesterday evening. I had known that the album was originally released as a series of apps, but I was reluctant to spend the $12.99 at the apple store on what I thought was just music and music videos. I was stunned to learn that through the app, each song on the album came with a corresponding "interactive game based on the song’s scientific and musical subject matter; a musical animation of the song; an animated score; lyrics; and an academic essay" (http://biophiliaeducational.org). As you could have guessed, I indeed bought the app after watching the documentary and have had a lot of fun so far making musical arpeggios with thunderbolt-like virtual Tesla coils, composing melodies according to systems based on planets' revolution around the sun as well as the moon's path in the night sky, rearranging the form of Björk's song "Crystalline" by directing crystals to grow through tunnels in minerals and rocks, creating scales by conducting electric currents between celestial bodies, and more. Not only do the visual representations and pedagogical applications associated with Björk's music demonstrate the fundamental structures and functions of natural elements, but the instruments and musical patterns used in each song are revolutionary in that they do not attempt to mimic the sounds we hear in nature (i.e. birdsongs, rustling of leaves, water flowing), but rather, I believe that, they work in ways that allow them to take a place alongside living things in nature. For example, to illustrate gravity in the song "Solstice" about planetary orbits, Björk commissioned a "Gravity Harp", a massive structure that consists of four robotic pendulums that slowly swing back and forth, plucking the string of a harp in its motion.

The ten songs/projects of Biophilia encompass the most general aspects of the world outside ourselves: the sun, moon, stars, planets, earth's tectonic plates, electricity, minerals, bacteria, viruses, DNA, and the beautiful, miraculous natural order of everything in the cosmos. To me, the Adirondacks, where "nature" is such an exalted force, seems like an awesome place to engage with Biophilia and appreciate its purpose to spread an "urge to affiliate with other forms of life" (as Edward O. Wilson defined 'biophilia' in his 1984 book of the same name, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis).

The notion that Björk felt inspired to embark on such an extensive project at this point in her career got me thinking about the realistic amount that humans think about their relation to other living things and their position in the universe in daily life. Perhaps Björk may not have been so compelled to produce Biophilia had she not felt that humans were out of touch with nature. As a primarily electronic musician, Björk has been notable throughout her career as a master of blending technology, natural beauty, and humanity. However, the urge to release an album exclusively dedicated to nature, - in her words, a work that treats nature as a rock star, - was born, as I suspect, out of the instinctual desire in spiritual, creatively-thinking beings to form a relationship with non-humans.

Many of the ways humans communicate with each other are absolutely ludicrous, but we continue to behave in manners that go against our very biology. Birdsongs are prevalent in the Adirondack Park, and I often find myself wondering why they sing. When I was younger, I merely thought birds sang because they did not have the intellectual capability to form spoken language like us. While this may be true, I now know that birds sing because it is their way of attracting mates and defending their territory. Many birds imitate sounds they hear; the Lyre Bird of Australia can even call the sounds of chainsaws and car horns! In terms of evolution, it makes little sense that humans talk when we have the widest range of pitches and vocal sounds of any species. We make music often to express what we cannot through the limited means of words. Music today is highly sexual, and, like birds, some of us flaunt our sound as a way of increasing romantic tension and/or inducing sexual arousal. Yet, most of us can be found typing away at electronic devices and speaking to each other rather than making music. Why is one of the most fundamental modes of communication so excruciatingly inaccessible? It takes years of practice to learn how to translate the notes on a page into produceable sound, and many people never have access to music education. Perhaps notating musical patterns in terms of blocks and shapes and colors is more intuitive than the music notation staff system as we know it today. Maybe the only way to get back to nature is to reach people through technology, through apps on an iPad, like Björk is doing.

As I thrust myself into the outdoors throughout the semester, knowing that I will soon be able to return to a place where computers are the most efficient way to download a book and microwaves heat my food, telling me my oatmeal is ready with an artificial "BEEP", I will continue to meditate on the continually growing process of promoting human to human relationships and human to nature relationships through technology, and what this means for how we regard ourselves as components of the universe. I will likely continue to discuss this idea in a later post...