Alaska’s Seismic Symphony

Image Gallery image by Patricia Fisher / www.fisherphoto.com

On a recent trip to the Alaskan interior, I didn’t get to see the aurora borealis, but I did, in a way, hear it. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called The Place Where You Go to Listen—a kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time. The name refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, an Iňupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that magical idea, The Place translates raw data into music. Information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations across Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into a vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

The Place occupies a small room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season. What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which Adams has named the Day Choir. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series—the rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string—and have the brightness of music in a major key. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. Pulsating patterns in the bass, which Adams calls Earth Drums, are activated by small earthquakes. Shimmering sounds in the extreme registers—the Aurora Bells—are tied to fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the northern lights.

The first day I was there, The Place was subdued. Checking the Alaskan data stations on my laptop, I saw that geomagnetic activity was negligible. Some minor seismic activity in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was an opaque ripple of beats. Clouds covered the sky, muting the Day Choir. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change; the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Certain the sun had come out, I went to look out the windows of the lobby. The Alaska Range was glistening on the far side of the Tanana Valley.