Matthew Burtner once wrote a dark night – specifically for moths.
“I was thinking about these moths, and how they have stunning ears.” Burtner says. “They’re similar to, say, these kinds of feathers that hang on their throats. There’s a picture of a moth, and it is adorned with two feathers of different sizes. So I thought, “Well I’ll create music for moths, so they can make use of their ears to hear something beautiful, too.”
Moths don’t have the ability to hear music we listen to because their ears are tuned towards higher frequency. Therefore, Burtner wrote something they could hear. The result”Moth Song” is just one of the many pieces that Burtner has composed throughout his long career in ecoacoustics which he claims boils down to an attempt to assist humans in establishing a better connection with nature.
Burtner of Naknek as a child and who grew up in Alaska and Alaska, says the sounds of nature’s world have always captivated him.
“When I was studying music I would play music outdoors, in the nature of the surroundings,” he says. “So it was like they’re linked to me, the sound from the winds, the water and snow and the sound of my saxophone or piano, or whatever instrument I were playing.”
Burtner has since developed the foundation of an industry-renowned career in the field of turning nature into music making use of recorded sound as well as research data which he converts into music. One of his current projects is on the changing seasons that occur in the Arctic lagoon. Scientists have monitored the lagoon’s temperature, salinity level, currents, and light throughout the year. Burtner transformed the information into a sound track which allows listeners to see how the water changes in the seasons.
“We receive a sound sense of how the ecosystem operates and the dynamic of it is an incredibly distinct audio,” he says. “It’s significantly more effective than looking at graphs that shows it.”
recording the mysterious sound of glaciers, seagrass beds and cooling lava can be a challenge. Burtner states that your regular microphone won’t do it.
“When there’s you know, tundra or a river covered by 3 feet of frozen ice and you’re trying to document that, there’s no real available, pre-built devices for this,” he says. “So much of it is working out what you might hear because you don’t know for certain what you’re hearing, and in a sense that’s the reason we’re there.”
He claims that there’s always an degree of risk when recording in extremely hostile conditions.
“I simply have a sort of ‘YOLO’ method to it, in which I’ll save and save and and make money, and then make grants, and buy this one piece of equipment, and then throw it into the ocean and pray that it will work out,” he says.
Burtner views his work as an opportunity to open people to a greater awareness to the nature of our world.
“Music is, as we say, thinking of it as a human expression” he states. “But when we extend the concept of the human experience and humanity into the glacier surely it’s creating music. If it is an animal that it is likely to create music, too. If we fail to recognize the music, it’s our own fault and not the glacier’s.”
Burtner’s work can be found on matthewburtner.com.
