Hearing and Seeing Climate Change, Through Music and AR

On a precariously slim two-lane roadway, bordered on each side by water lapping practically on the asphalt floor, a string ensemble performs, seemingly oblivious to its environment.

That’s as a result of the 4 musicians of the Tesla Quartet aren’t actually acting on this causeway, which ends up in Hoopers Island—three watermen’s villages perched within the Chesapeake Bay off the coast of Dorchester County. They’re there due to augmented actuality (AR) which blends the digital world with the bodily one, to inform a musical story about how local weather change is ravaging this a part of Maryland.

On Sunday, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Heart will current “Rising Tides,” a brand new musical efficiency comprising a collection of commissioned items reflecting how the state of Maryland, particularly the water-centric Jap Shore, is seeing communities, farmland and public infrastructure more and more succumb to rising sea ranges and different penalties of local weather change. Concertgoers can watch and take heed to the items in AR via the app ImmerSphere, which locations the musicians within the spots that influenced the composers.

Richard Scerbo, creative planning program director at The Clarice, mentioned he has lengthy been contemplating “how the music that we’re programming right here at The Clarice can have an effect on our communities and communicate to social problems with our time,” he mentioned. “Local weather change has been on my checklist.”

So he, together with the Tesla Quartet (who’re being introduced as a part of The Clarice’s Visiting Artist Program), approached Maryland-based composers Alexandra Gardner and Adrian B. Sims ’22 to see in the event that they is likely to be thinking about writing items that spoke to the impression of local weather change on the Chesapeake Bay and the individuals who stay on its shores. “The undertaking sounded proper up my alley,” mentioned Gardner. “A number of my work is impressed by the pure world and pure sciences, and naturally I’m involved about local weather change.”

The timing was serendipitous: Gardner and her mates had not too long ago visited Hoopers Island and been struck by the proximity of the water to the thin causeway that connects the islands to the mainland. “It was a extremely sobering expertise to drive on the market and see the ditches beside the street as you strategy the island filled with water on a dry summer season day,” she mentioned. “We had been like, ‘Wow, what’s it wish to drive this when it’s really raining, or at night time when there’s no gentle?’”

[The Tides That Bind]

Gardner’s piece is made up of three actions, titled “Causeway,” “Ceremony” and “Ghost Pines.” Every is impressed by a location on Hoopers Island, areas that may be seen—and heard—via ImmerSphere. Within the app, the Tesla Quartet’s music is complemented by the ambient sounds of the atmosphere surrounding them: the light splashing of water, the whoosh of wind via tall grasses, or the eerie silence of a pine forest whose timber have been killed off by saltwater encroachment.

The “Ghost Pines” motion is “noisy and scratchy,” Gardner mentioned, echoing “what I think about (is) the sound of a tree having the vitamins sucked out of it.”

Gardner hopes that the efficiency—and its AR/VR element—will encourage folks to face the problem of local weather change within the state. “Individuals typically don’t notice there’s an issue till they see it or are in it, so it is a option to immerse folks on this atmosphere to allow them to expertise a bit of little bit of it, or a sense of it, even when they’ll’t really be there,” she mentioned.