energy and place
My Chemistry project: Click Here
Music in Nature: Sound Logic
Tony Williams
Abstract: Throughout this project, I was determined to bring my love for nature and my love for music together in a coherent essay while also revealing my environmental ethic. For a few years now, I’ve been hearing music in nature, with the landscapes conjuring up notes in my mind depending on where I am. The most potent times of music in nature come when I am rafting and isolated from any modernities that provide man-made music in my everyday life. Through descriptive language and metaphors, I try to explain how I see Desolation Canyon on the Green River: “Grandiose cliff faces scream out with majestic voices of trumpets, while distant rainclouds offer a welcome calm reminiscent of sugary piano jazz.“ I feel that words can only go so far in terms of describing nature, so I’ve done my best, within the suffocating confines of the English language, to share a small part of how I view the world.
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Some man-made objects seem to hold almost infinite beauty. The most striking example of this is music, the most natural of artificial beauties. I can smoothly glide downriver like an eagle, calmly riding the current's frigid thermals, but I can't escape a haunting, ghostly whisper in my mind: "This place is made of music." From the dissonant clashing chords of canyon walls to the symphonic majesty of snowy mountaintops, the landscapes surreptitiously conjure up sounds in my mind. Through the week-long trips in the silty diminished-7-chord water of the Green River, I am isolated from any musical influence, save the melodious hummings of birds and the dampened, haunting echoes of the canyon walls.
Yet beyond the occasional thirst for the silky ebony and ivory cascades of piano keys beneath my fingers, I don’t find myself missing the music. The canyon supplies the concert hall, the tough, rigid rock formations the violins. I’m the unworthy audience of God’s 9th symphony. Each sunset marks the end of the day’s frenetic movement, while the nighttime stars provide a quiet intermission. Grandiose cliff faces scream out with majestic voices of trumpets, while distant rainclouds offer a welcome calm reminiscent of sugary piano jazz. From start to end, any extended time spent in nature inevitably conjures up music in my mind, unending hymns ranging from calming classical to modern jazz-funk.
I often wonder why I hear music in nature. After all, pristine mountaintops don’t have grand pianos sprouting out of their meadows. Why, then, are apparently haphazard conglomerates of wavelengths the most powerful emotional force in my life? This is a mystery I have grappled with for years. Music is the most natural part of me, and it is heartbreaking to imagine the world without it. One of the greatest contradictions of my life is my seemingly innate emotional attachment to music, coupled with the inescapable knowledge that at the core of music lies an icy, emotionless assemblage of metals, wood, and soil. For though my rationale tells me that untainted ground and eloquent sound are not compatible, I cannot disconnect them.
I firmly believe that there is a reason that I hear music in nature. It’s not by choice, or simply because I am a music lover. I think that there is a distinct connection between who we are and what our environment has to offer. As Aldo Leopold once said; “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” We can’t stop painstakingly digging our own graves, trying in vain to capture, using language, a power beyond language. Yet what dictionary can adequately depict the sight of a bighorn sheep majestically perched high upon steep, sunbathed red rocks? Or the sound of wind subtly forcing its harsh, angular rhetoric upon the ignorant, dried out bushes? Words can seldom pry open the door of emotion, and the most talented writers are the first to admit that language is, at best, a proxy for how nature makes us feel.
Yet music is a more effective, though more mysterious, way of expressing the same emotions. Musicians speak through metaphor, creating abstractions that, through attempting to mirror the spoken language, transcend its intentions and communicates in raw emotion. The natural world, too, requires no words. Since it speaks through feelings and through experience, we, the “civilized”, cannot grasp the complexity. As melancholy rivers mellifluously meander in their sluggish but hopeful manner, they babble endlessly to the landscape in a tongue comprehensible only to the wordless. The written language is both an enabler and a disabler.
For precisely this reason, I see nature in the same way as music. Leo Tolstoy said that “music is the shorthand of emotion.” I will take this one step further: the world is the creator’s shorthand of emotion, and music is our access point. The entire universe is set up in such a way that we can feel much more than we can think. There are natural situations that inevitably don’t make logical sense, concepts that can’t possibly be deduced through the use of hard evidence. For me, the path to enlightenment lies in just 12 notes. Through the creative harnessing of tone and rhythm, I begin to make emotional sense of the world, matching angelic sounds with angelic landscapes. I communicate between the natural and the artificial world using a common language: music.
From the most remote of box canyons to compact urban markets, I constantly have a song running through my mind. This is nature’s calling to me; an urge to align my mind’s musical soliloquy with the rest of the world. I would define myself as an “artistic conservationist”; I believe that the path toward saving the earth is understanding it, and that path begins with an emotional connection rising above the written language. We may not gain answers through the arts, but we can use an appreciation of the natural world to bolster our efforts toward saving it. Living sustainably inevitably involves a fundamental understanding of the world. I believe that this understanding must eclipse speech, writing, and thoughts.
When the B-flat-major cliff faces give way to the soft, jazzy ballad of the dusty old gas stations on the dried out plains, civilization is a welcome sight. Allocating just a week to hear the world’s true music refreshes my perspective every year. Throughout the grimy, fossil-fueled trek back into modern times, the powerful voices of hills and shrubs call out to me. But soon their voices are blocked by power lines and oil rigs, and I return to my modernistic conviction that my iPhone 5 can harness the power of notes in the same way as the earth’s amphitheater. I’m not going to live as a hermit in nature. Yet every year, the howling rapids and unforgiving sun call me to a fuller and more exciting existence. They call me to become part of the generation that bridges the gap between pristine wilderness and behemoth cities, to do my part in sustainably maintaining modern life. But when the sunset concludes my life’s symphony, I want the final movement to be in Desolation Canyon.
Tony Williams
Abstract: Throughout this project, I was determined to bring my love for nature and my love for music together in a coherent essay while also revealing my environmental ethic. For a few years now, I’ve been hearing music in nature, with the landscapes conjuring up notes in my mind depending on where I am. The most potent times of music in nature come when I am rafting and isolated from any modernities that provide man-made music in my everyday life. Through descriptive language and metaphors, I try to explain how I see Desolation Canyon on the Green River: “Grandiose cliff faces scream out with majestic voices of trumpets, while distant rainclouds offer a welcome calm reminiscent of sugary piano jazz.“ I feel that words can only go so far in terms of describing nature, so I’ve done my best, within the suffocating confines of the English language, to share a small part of how I view the world.
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Some man-made objects seem to hold almost infinite beauty. The most striking example of this is music, the most natural of artificial beauties. I can smoothly glide downriver like an eagle, calmly riding the current's frigid thermals, but I can't escape a haunting, ghostly whisper in my mind: "This place is made of music." From the dissonant clashing chords of canyon walls to the symphonic majesty of snowy mountaintops, the landscapes surreptitiously conjure up sounds in my mind. Through the week-long trips in the silty diminished-7-chord water of the Green River, I am isolated from any musical influence, save the melodious hummings of birds and the dampened, haunting echoes of the canyon walls.
Yet beyond the occasional thirst for the silky ebony and ivory cascades of piano keys beneath my fingers, I don’t find myself missing the music. The canyon supplies the concert hall, the tough, rigid rock formations the violins. I’m the unworthy audience of God’s 9th symphony. Each sunset marks the end of the day’s frenetic movement, while the nighttime stars provide a quiet intermission. Grandiose cliff faces scream out with majestic voices of trumpets, while distant rainclouds offer a welcome calm reminiscent of sugary piano jazz. From start to end, any extended time spent in nature inevitably conjures up music in my mind, unending hymns ranging from calming classical to modern jazz-funk.
I often wonder why I hear music in nature. After all, pristine mountaintops don’t have grand pianos sprouting out of their meadows. Why, then, are apparently haphazard conglomerates of wavelengths the most powerful emotional force in my life? This is a mystery I have grappled with for years. Music is the most natural part of me, and it is heartbreaking to imagine the world without it. One of the greatest contradictions of my life is my seemingly innate emotional attachment to music, coupled with the inescapable knowledge that at the core of music lies an icy, emotionless assemblage of metals, wood, and soil. For though my rationale tells me that untainted ground and eloquent sound are not compatible, I cannot disconnect them.
I firmly believe that there is a reason that I hear music in nature. It’s not by choice, or simply because I am a music lover. I think that there is a distinct connection between who we are and what our environment has to offer. As Aldo Leopold once said; “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” We can’t stop painstakingly digging our own graves, trying in vain to capture, using language, a power beyond language. Yet what dictionary can adequately depict the sight of a bighorn sheep majestically perched high upon steep, sunbathed red rocks? Or the sound of wind subtly forcing its harsh, angular rhetoric upon the ignorant, dried out bushes? Words can seldom pry open the door of emotion, and the most talented writers are the first to admit that language is, at best, a proxy for how nature makes us feel.
Yet music is a more effective, though more mysterious, way of expressing the same emotions. Musicians speak through metaphor, creating abstractions that, through attempting to mirror the spoken language, transcend its intentions and communicates in raw emotion. The natural world, too, requires no words. Since it speaks through feelings and through experience, we, the “civilized”, cannot grasp the complexity. As melancholy rivers mellifluously meander in their sluggish but hopeful manner, they babble endlessly to the landscape in a tongue comprehensible only to the wordless. The written language is both an enabler and a disabler.
For precisely this reason, I see nature in the same way as music. Leo Tolstoy said that “music is the shorthand of emotion.” I will take this one step further: the world is the creator’s shorthand of emotion, and music is our access point. The entire universe is set up in such a way that we can feel much more than we can think. There are natural situations that inevitably don’t make logical sense, concepts that can’t possibly be deduced through the use of hard evidence. For me, the path to enlightenment lies in just 12 notes. Through the creative harnessing of tone and rhythm, I begin to make emotional sense of the world, matching angelic sounds with angelic landscapes. I communicate between the natural and the artificial world using a common language: music.
From the most remote of box canyons to compact urban markets, I constantly have a song running through my mind. This is nature’s calling to me; an urge to align my mind’s musical soliloquy with the rest of the world. I would define myself as an “artistic conservationist”; I believe that the path toward saving the earth is understanding it, and that path begins with an emotional connection rising above the written language. We may not gain answers through the arts, but we can use an appreciation of the natural world to bolster our efforts toward saving it. Living sustainably inevitably involves a fundamental understanding of the world. I believe that this understanding must eclipse speech, writing, and thoughts.
When the B-flat-major cliff faces give way to the soft, jazzy ballad of the dusty old gas stations on the dried out plains, civilization is a welcome sight. Allocating just a week to hear the world’s true music refreshes my perspective every year. Throughout the grimy, fossil-fueled trek back into modern times, the powerful voices of hills and shrubs call out to me. But soon their voices are blocked by power lines and oil rigs, and I return to my modernistic conviction that my iPhone 5 can harness the power of notes in the same way as the earth’s amphitheater. I’m not going to live as a hermit in nature. Yet every year, the howling rapids and unforgiving sun call me to a fuller and more exciting existence. They call me to become part of the generation that bridges the gap between pristine wilderness and behemoth cities, to do my part in sustainably maintaining modern life. But when the sunset concludes my life’s symphony, I want the final movement to be in Desolation Canyon.
Artist Statement
My entire essay is about the music that I find in the natural world. For this reason, I decided that I would use photoshop to try to demonstrate how I see and hear music in nature. I did this using a photograph my mom took up at Molas Pass. It is a beautiful picture with mountains and trees reflected in a crystal-clear lake. To show how I see music in nature, I made the reflection into an orchestra and superimposed music notes all around the background. I decided to make the reflection into the musical part because that’s how I see music in nature; it is a reflection of all things beautiful.
I created the music notes simply by putting them in aesthetically pleasing places and making them more opaque or less opaque based on where they would be in the piece. Next, I copied the orchestra and put them in the lake. This proved to be tricky, because I needed to make the orchestra take up the whole lake. For this reason, I copied and pasted certain instruments to make the orchestra shaped in the right way to fill the lake. Then, I changed the image so that the mountains, symphony, and trees roughly follow the “rule of thirds”, which states that main items stand out more if they are two-thirds of the way toward one side of the picture. Lastly, I made the entire lake blue and eliminated the reflection of the mountains to make the orchestra stand out more.
I believe that art is key to understanding nature, as I reveal numerous times throughout my essay. For me, the understanding comes through music. I think that this photoshop project shows how I see music in nature, with grandiose tones emitting from the crystal clear reflections of mountain lakes. Photoshop was the perfect means for me to combine music and nature in a way that is meaningful and demonstrates my essay’s perspective.
Photo Used
Frost Symphony Orchestra. Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, miami.edu
My entire essay is about the music that I find in the natural world. For this reason, I decided that I would use photoshop to try to demonstrate how I see and hear music in nature. I did this using a photograph my mom took up at Molas Pass. It is a beautiful picture with mountains and trees reflected in a crystal-clear lake. To show how I see music in nature, I made the reflection into an orchestra and superimposed music notes all around the background. I decided to make the reflection into the musical part because that’s how I see music in nature; it is a reflection of all things beautiful.
I created the music notes simply by putting them in aesthetically pleasing places and making them more opaque or less opaque based on where they would be in the piece. Next, I copied the orchestra and put them in the lake. This proved to be tricky, because I needed to make the orchestra take up the whole lake. For this reason, I copied and pasted certain instruments to make the orchestra shaped in the right way to fill the lake. Then, I changed the image so that the mountains, symphony, and trees roughly follow the “rule of thirds”, which states that main items stand out more if they are two-thirds of the way toward one side of the picture. Lastly, I made the entire lake blue and eliminated the reflection of the mountains to make the orchestra stand out more.
I believe that art is key to understanding nature, as I reveal numerous times throughout my essay. For me, the understanding comes through music. I think that this photoshop project shows how I see music in nature, with grandiose tones emitting from the crystal clear reflections of mountain lakes. Photoshop was the perfect means for me to combine music and nature in a way that is meaningful and demonstrates my essay’s perspective.
Photo Used
Frost Symphony Orchestra. Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, miami.edu
Project Reflection
In this project, we first covered content by several artists who write about their environmental ethics. We read essays by authors like Edward Abbey who detail their love for the environment and nature. After reading and analyzing this content, we began to write in our inspiration journals, where we began to brainstorm ideas for the project. After this, we drafted our essays and created visual pieces to finish up the project. For me, the inspiration journal assignment was particularly helpful in getting my ideas across so that I had a good idea of what I was doing for my draft. The point of the essay was to explore our personal environmental ethic and convey it effectively. In all, this project was well-structured to help students have the maximum opportunity for success in describing their environmental ethic.
I feel that I’ve grown throughout this project in knowing how I feel about the natural world. Throughout my life, I have found that I hear music in my head in nature. However, I never really was able to put this into words until this essay. Even now, words are a poor means to describe nature, as I explicitly write in my essay: “Words can seldom pry open the door of emotion, and the most talented writers are the first to admit that language is, at best, a proxy for how nature makes us feel.” In humility and through music, I feel that I have found a good way to understand what nature means to me. The essay writing process helped me to grow personally and to find out new things about how I see the world.
I am most proud of the way that I was able to use descriptive language in my essay and get rave reviews from Jessica. For example, in one of my paragraphs, I had this passage: “Yet beyond the occasional thirst for the silky ebony and ivory cascades of piano keys beneath my fingers, I don’t find myself missing the music. The canyon supplies the concert hall, the tough, rigid rock formations the violins. I’m the unworthy audience of God’s 9th symphony. “ I was able to portray my environmental ethic and how I feel about nature through descriptive, vivid language, of which I am very proud. I spent hours just formatting and reformatting sentences to use the correct words to say exactly what I meant. For example, I had the words “celibate ground”, but this implies that it is barren and has never been used. So I changed this is “untainted ground”, a small but intricate change that helped to improve my essay as a whole.
I thought that the joint Chemistry and Humanities project was a very good idea, but not necessarily implemented very well. In principle, it should work very well; Steve Smith provides the content and the hard facts, while Jessica or Ashley provide a more biased view of the issues. However, we hardly ever worked on the same things in both classes. For me, it felt like two different processes, both of which produced great products. In Chemistry, I was focused solely on the debate and bringing facts to the table, while my Humanities project had a much more emotional spin. I think that, in the future, the two classes could coordinate better to make the projects truly intertwine, perhaps even requiring one big project with several parts that we have both Humanities and Chemistry time to work on. This being said, the project was very enjoyable and I feel that I grew in several ways in knowing my environmental ethic and more about myself.
In this project, we first covered content by several artists who write about their environmental ethics. We read essays by authors like Edward Abbey who detail their love for the environment and nature. After reading and analyzing this content, we began to write in our inspiration journals, where we began to brainstorm ideas for the project. After this, we drafted our essays and created visual pieces to finish up the project. For me, the inspiration journal assignment was particularly helpful in getting my ideas across so that I had a good idea of what I was doing for my draft. The point of the essay was to explore our personal environmental ethic and convey it effectively. In all, this project was well-structured to help students have the maximum opportunity for success in describing their environmental ethic.
I feel that I’ve grown throughout this project in knowing how I feel about the natural world. Throughout my life, I have found that I hear music in my head in nature. However, I never really was able to put this into words until this essay. Even now, words are a poor means to describe nature, as I explicitly write in my essay: “Words can seldom pry open the door of emotion, and the most talented writers are the first to admit that language is, at best, a proxy for how nature makes us feel.” In humility and through music, I feel that I have found a good way to understand what nature means to me. The essay writing process helped me to grow personally and to find out new things about how I see the world.
I am most proud of the way that I was able to use descriptive language in my essay and get rave reviews from Jessica. For example, in one of my paragraphs, I had this passage: “Yet beyond the occasional thirst for the silky ebony and ivory cascades of piano keys beneath my fingers, I don’t find myself missing the music. The canyon supplies the concert hall, the tough, rigid rock formations the violins. I’m the unworthy audience of God’s 9th symphony. “ I was able to portray my environmental ethic and how I feel about nature through descriptive, vivid language, of which I am very proud. I spent hours just formatting and reformatting sentences to use the correct words to say exactly what I meant. For example, I had the words “celibate ground”, but this implies that it is barren and has never been used. So I changed this is “untainted ground”, a small but intricate change that helped to improve my essay as a whole.
I thought that the joint Chemistry and Humanities project was a very good idea, but not necessarily implemented very well. In principle, it should work very well; Steve Smith provides the content and the hard facts, while Jessica or Ashley provide a more biased view of the issues. However, we hardly ever worked on the same things in both classes. For me, it felt like two different processes, both of which produced great products. In Chemistry, I was focused solely on the debate and bringing facts to the table, while my Humanities project had a much more emotional spin. I think that, in the future, the two classes could coordinate better to make the projects truly intertwine, perhaps even requiring one big project with several parts that we have both Humanities and Chemistry time to work on. This being said, the project was very enjoyable and I feel that I grew in several ways in knowing my environmental ethic and more about myself.