A passion for science and music

Within the quiet corridor outdoors of Hayden Library, Zoe Levitt’s comfortable, musical voice fills the room. The acoustics are good for amplifying her phrases and her innate ardour for geology. Or, extra particularly, paleomagnetism — utilizing magnetism to review the geological historical past of the Earth — which is the main focus of her senior thesis.

“The query is, when did plate tectonics truly begin?” Levitt explains, her arms shifting in rhythm together with her phrases. “Was it intermittent? Or was it steady?”

As a senior in Course 12 (Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, or EAPS), it looks as if Levitt is on monitor to move off to graduate faculty and additional her geological pursuits elsewhere. However she’s not. Levitt’s time at MIT has been full of surprising surprises, together with selecting geology as her main within the first place. Now that she’s completed, she’s settled on a completely totally different discipline: songwriting.

“I actually have beloved finding out geology,” she explains. “However proper now, I actually really feel the necessity to pursue music.”

Levitt grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, no stranger to the folks of MIT and their ardour. When she arrived at MIT, she had been considering of majoring in math or engineering. However she was persuaded to main in geology after signing up for a Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP) to Yellowstone and Grand Teton nationwide parks.

“I actually utilized for the journey simply because I needed to get out of Boston and go see some place else,” she laughs, confessing that the concept of simply going to eating places or different locations within the space appeared too boring. The journey additionally coincided with the 2017 eclipse, so between that, climbing, and studying about geology with consultants, Levitt was bought.

She did geology analysis the summer season after her first 12 months, working with a postdoc in Kristin Bergmann’s lab, the place they checked out 1.8-billion-year-old rocks to attempt to perceive the oxygen surroundings on the time of their creation. She did her first discipline work journey to Michigan, after which within the fall returned to Yellowstone on the FPOP journey, this time as a educating assistant.

“I feel EAPS is basically particular in that you just get to go on these journeys into the sphere with professors and actually get to know them and get to know their experience,” she says. One in every of her favourite EAPS moments was a visit in January 2020. The sector cook dinner had introduced a guitar and Levitt introduced her mandolin, and collectively they jammed across the campfire whereas everybody chatted.

Music has lengthy been part of Levitt’s life. Her father purchased her a Child Taylor guitar for her sixth birthday, and he or she switched to mandolin as her main instrument just a few years later. She grew up within the bluegrass scene, attending festivals together with her father.

“I used to be at all times actually pushed by the melodies of compositions, however I by no means actually paid consideration to the phrases,” she explains. “I used to be going by a reasonably robust time and ended up beginning to write songs to course of what was taking place.”

In spring 2020, Levitt was able to take a severe step into songwriting, so she reached out to Celia Woodsmith, a Grammy Award-nominated musician. Woodsmith, like many musicians whose plans have been disrupted by the pandemic, agreed to classes.

Levitt’s songwriting first started as a manner for her to course of her feelings and experiences as a sexual assault survivor. She has since shared her songs to lift consciousness, together with recording two songs about her expertise as a survivor for Nationwide Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Contest and performing an autobiographical piece within the 2022 MIT monologues. She additionally carried out on the Boston Space Rape Disaster Middle’s Stroll for Change and recorded a tune for the Cambridge Girls’s Middle’s video commemorating their fiftieth anniversary.

“I hope that sharing my songs can convey therapeutic to others because it has for me,” she says.

Since then, Levitt has been utilizing her “curiosity and a ardour for discovery” from her time in EAPS to discover new matters in her music, reminiscent of psychological well being struggles, historic narratives, and satirical songs. Her tune “We Flattened the Curve”, feedback satirically on the U.S. Covid-19 response utilizing mathematical observations. Levitt, who along with majoring in geology is minoring in each music and math, jokes that she’s “already placing that math diploma to some good use!”

Despite the fact that Levitt formally graduated within the spring, she isn’t completed with MIT simply but. She was awarded an Eloranta Summer season Undergraduate Analysis Fellowship, which she’ll be utilizing to additional her musical pursuits. This fall she hopes to journey to Nepal to collaborate with native musicians on a venture recording and transcribing conventional music. 

And she or he isn’t completed with geology, both. She’ll be spending six weeks doing fieldwork with EAPS Professor Oliver Jagoutz within the Himalayas in July. 

“I have not made it out to the sphere since [2020] so I am actually excited to get again on the market,” she says. “Within the fall I will be specializing in sharing my music in the intervening time, after which see what occurs from there.”