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Profiled from Atmospheres

Matthew Burtner composer

Release Date: August 16, 2024
Catalog #: RR8106
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Avant-Garde
Experimental
Electroacoustic
String Quartet

If someone told you there was music that could lull pillowy-winged moths into a fluttery state of happiness, that the Aurora Borealis can sing even better than you and I, or that the roots of the American elm trees in Central Park are a bustling ensemble waiting for their cue, would you believe them? Matthew Burtner would, and he’d have no trouble proving it on PROFILED FROM ATMOSPHERES, the veteran ecoacoustic composer’s sixth release with Ravello Records. Burtner lifts the veil between humanity and its planet, translating its messages into an intimate medium invariably understood amongst its inhabitants. These messages make an urgent case in the titular work Profiled From Atmospheres, a collaborative work between atmospheric sound profiles derived from humanity’s top three greenhouse gas emissions and saxophone/percussion duo Michael Weiss and Elizabeth Soflin. The result is an eerie, haunting sonification that serves as a poignant reminder; if we want to continue hearing the songs of the atmosphere and the planet it blankets, it’s our responsibility to preserve it.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Piece for a Northern Sky (2013) Matthew Burtner Matthew Burtner, vibraphone; atmosphere ecoacoustics 5:03
02 Auroras (2022) Matthew Burtner northern lights ecoacoustics 7:31
03 Arbor (2023): Mother Tree Matthew Burtner Bruno Eicher, violin; Mary Hammann, viola; Sarah Crocker Vonsattel, violin; Kari Jane Docter, cello; tree ecoacoustics 4:27
04 Arbor (2023): Roots Matthew Burtner Bruno Eicher, violin; Mary Hammann, viola; Sarah Crocker Vonsattel, violin; Kari Jane Docter, cello; tree ecoacoustics 2:00
05 Arbor (2023): Trunk Matthew Burtner Bruno Eicher, violin; Mary Hammann, viola; Sarah Crocker Vonsattel, violin; Kari Jane Docter, cello; tree ecoacoustics 4:35
06 Arbor (2023): Canopy Matthew Burtner Bruno Eicher, violin; Mary Hammann, viola; Sarah Crocker Vonsattel, violin; Kari Jane Docter, cello; tree ecoacoustics 3:03
07 Arbor (2023): Stand Matthew Burtner Bruno Eicher, violin; Mary Hammann, viola; Sarah Crocker Vonsattel, violin; Kari Jane Docter, cello; tree ecoacoustics 5:56
08 Wind Rose (2016) Matthew Burtner Matthew Burtner, acoustics; Jody Sperling, amplified choreography; Time Lapse Dance Ensemble | Frances Barker, Anika Hunter, Maki Kitahara, Nicole Lemelin, Sarah Tracy amplified movement; wind ecoacoustics 7:16
09 Nocturne (Moth Music) (2012) Matthew Burtner Matthew Burtner, soprano saxophone; Glen Whitehead, trumpet; signal processor, ultrasonic speakers, noise generator 8:10
10 Profiled from Atmospheres (2017): 1959 Matthew Burtner Weiss/Soflin Duo | Michael Weiss, alto saxophone; Elizabeth Soflin, percussion; atmosphere ecoacoustics 2:57
11 Profiled from Atmospheres (2017): 1987 Matthew Burtner Weiss/Soflin Duo | Michael Weiss, alto saxophone; Elizabeth Soflin, percussion; atmosphere ecoacoustics 3:30
12 Profiled from Atmospheres (2017): 2015 Matthew Burtner Weiss/Soflin Duo | Michael Weiss, alto saxophone; Elizabeth Soflin, percussion; atmosphere ecoacoustics 2:24
13 Profiled from Atmospheres (2017): 2050 Matthew Burtner Weiss/Soflin Duo | Michael Weiss, alto saxophone; Elizabeth Soflin, percussion; atmosphere ecoacoustics 3:28

Dedication
“To my mom, Judith, who let me face out into the wind; and my dad, Leslie, who taught me to face it bravely.” — Matthew Burtner

Arbor
Recorded by SoundProof Studios

Profiled from Atmospheres
Recorded by Four/Ten Media

Mastering Melanie Montgomery

Executive Producer Bob Lord

A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Chris Robinson

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Morgan Hauber
Publicity Chelsea Kornago
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Matthew Burtner

Composer

Matthew Burtner is an Alaskan-born composer, sound artist, and eco-acoustician whose work explores embodiment, ecology, polytemporality, and noise. His music comfortably crosses boundaries between environmental science and art, philosophy and acoustics, technology and body, and he is a leading practitioner of climate change music and ecoacoustic sound art. As a composer, Burtner seeks out contexts where critical issues of human/nature interaction are addressed, whether in musical contexts, other forms of media, scientific conferences, or political conventions. His music has been performed in concerts around the world and featured by organizations such as NASA, PBS NewsHour, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the BBC, the U.S. State Department under President Obama, and National Geographic.

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Notes

Piece for a Northern Sky (2016) is the first of three pieces on this album composed for Time Lapse Dance of New York City. Since 2015, Burtner has composed and performed for Time Lapse Dance, creating large-scale works of environmental sound and movement in collaboration with choreographer Jody Sperling. Piece for a Northern Sky creates vortices of sound with vibraphone rhythms based on Fibonacci sequence patterns. The music accompanies a single whirl of movement, with sound and movement together modeling the atmospheric cyclical and fractal-like patterns of atmospheric movement in the Arctic.

Auroras (2020) was commissioned by BBC London for the radio show, “Songs of the Sky,” which first aired on “Between the Ears,” BBC Radio 3. The musical composition uses audio recordings of the northern lights made in Alaska by the composer using VLF sensors to audify the aurora’s electromagnetic energy into electronic sound. Those sounds are noisy and complex with beautiful streaks of frequency and crackling rhythms. In the piece we hear the VLF signals directly and mapped into different synthesizers. In this way, Burtner orchestrates the energy of the aurora borealis to explore different sonic characters.

What began as a work about the oldest grove of American Elm trees in the world, located in New York’s Central Park, grew into a multi-movement work for ecological sound and dance focused on the life cycle of trees. The music builds dramatic ecoacoustic structures using field recordings of the underground roots of trees and the inside of tree trunks and branches, along with synthesized sonifications of tree growth data, all accompanied with string quartet. Trees are profiled by atmosphere, and their rings hold a record of atmospheric conditions over their life. In the last section of Arbor, the movement called “Stand,” the rhythms of the music are a sonification of tree ring data, the unique pulse of the music looping the life span of one tree as a complex atmospheric rhythm profile.

Wind Rose (2016) involved an unusual compositional process in which movement sequences generate sound from the Time Lapse dancers’ unique costumes. Burtner composed a fugue arranging Sperling’s choreographed gestures into a sonic counterpoint that then yielded choreographic design. This fascinating process led to a deeply blended sound-movement artwork. The dancers’ movements and vocalizations can be heard in the recording. The dancers are also credited here as “musicians” since they are generating the sound!

A wind rose is a measure of the intensity and directionality of wind in a place over time. The piece uses a wind rose of Manhattan as an interactive interface to play a computer-generated noise and wind model along with the dancers.

Nocturne (Moth Music) (2012) creates a sonic safe space for moths to pollinate, cloaking them from bat echolocation and offering these most beneficial insects a different and hopefully pleasing sound experience. Moths are incredibly productive pollinators, more vital even than bees. They are active at night and have evolved ultrasonic hearing specifically to detect the echolocation signals of bats, their primary predator. Moths have beautiful feather-like ears located on their thorax, and Burtner wanted to create music for the moths so that they could enjoy sound as pleasure, not just as a warning of imminent death. The two-part counterpoint addresses the two differently-sized moth ears resonating softly to a duet of tones of slightly different timbres. Moth ears are delicate and so the music is quiet and gentle. The music also does not have a regular pulse or any percussive quality because this might remind the moths of bat echolocation signals. The instruments are additionally processed through reverberation to help smooth out any attacks or sudden changes in sound. In addition to the instrumental music, Burtner created a broadband noise generator track to mask bat echolocation, acting like a sonic fog to protect the moths while they are active.

Moths hear in the ultrasonic range, well above and outside of our human range of hearing, and above the range of our typical speakers. For this reason, for an installation of Moth Music, the sound should be pitch shifted up and played from ultrasonic speakers.

Could Nocturne (Moth Music) promote pollination by protecting moths from bat predators and simultaneously stimulating their productivity? This experimental research has not been done, but it could be productive for naturalists to explore Nocturne as restoration science.

Profiled from Atmospheres (2017) for alto saxophone, percussion, and greenhouse gas atmospheric sonifications tracks the three primary greenhouse gasses emitted by humans across the years 1959, 1987, 2015 and projected to 2050. The atmospheric profiles result in four chords that define the harmonic foundation of the piece. The instrumental parts also sonify the accumulation of these greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

Human-emitted gasses contribute to global warming due to the greenhouse effect. They absorb radiation from the sun and release that energy as heat, warming the atmosphere. The more of these greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the greater the heat they cause. Of these greenhouse gasses, the three most potent are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), currently accounting for 98% of greenhouse gas emissions. The increase of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere directly correlates to the increase of global temperatures. As CO2 has increased from c.315 parts per million to over 420 parts per million since the 1950s, the average planet temperature has increased by 0.89°C (1.6 degrees F). CO2 levels are expected to reach 800 parts per million by 2050. Based on the changes between 1950 and 2015, and extrapolating to 2050, the temperature will increase by over 5°F. Scientists conservatively estimate this number at 3.6° F.

The data used for the sonification came from the Kyoto Protocol (unfccc.int/documents/34558).

The sonification accounts for the “Global Warming Potential” of the different gasses, a measure of the impact of each gas on global warming. For example, methane gas is 25 times more potent for global warming than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is 310 times more powerful as a global warmer. This means that a relatively smaller amount of these gasses has a much greater impact on global warming. Profiled from Atmospheres accounts for these different potentials.

Profiled from Atmospheres was commissioned by the Weiss/Soflin Duo.

I’m immeasurably grateful for my family’s support. Aniseh, Barrett, and Lylah endorse me unconditionally, even when I’m composing with the sounds of the northern lights, writing music for moths, or trying to find the songs in the wind’s noise! They graciously let me have space for an ecoacoustic sound studio in our house to compose these wild works.

My dear friend and collaborator Jody Sperling has embodied my environmental music in movement, and I’m most grateful to be a part of her Time Lapse Dance world. Time Lapse has commissioned some of my best pieces over the last decade — works like Ice Cycle, Wind Rose, and Arbor — and working on these projects has challenged my music to support human movement and expanded modes of communication.

The University of Virginia has been the core financial backer of my ecoacoustic music experimental research including much of the production of this album. The office of the Provost for the Arts, the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures, the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, the Coastal Conservatory, the Environmental Institute, and the College of Arts and Sciences have all supported the production presented here.

Profiled From Atmospheres was made possible thanks to generous support from Brad Schilit, Michael T. Pratt, DeLane Doyle and Aaron, Gochberg Esther Groves, Rhett Bender and Terry Longshore, Dr. Norman Weinberg, Madeleine Wing Adler and Fred Lane, Luc Nadeau and Family, Joanne LaMotte, Dr. Rick Puzzo, Beverly J. Weiss, Melanie Voytovich, Susan Mayer, Pat and Kathy McIntyre, Tristan Rogers, Katherine Wood and Ted Smith, Stephan A. Terre, W. Aniseh Burtner, Derek Laney, The Toole Family, Maggie Cuson, Beth Dyer, Clary Juliana Warkentin, Patty Tersey, and Robert Weiss.

— Matthew Burtner