Leif Karlstrom's Volcano Listening Project: A Unique Fusion of Science and Music
This link button takes you to the podcast and video versions of my interview with Leif Karlstrom, as well as the complete show notes with other important links!
Below that is the transcript of the interview:
Leif Karlstrom:
General public is that people are just sort of tune out science for whatever reason. There's cultural reasons for this, but when you hear something, it elicits an emotional response. And so you're kind of drawn in. And I've found that that's a really effective way to get people to engage with whatever it is that we're talking about. Whether it's, I dunno, earthquakes, there's some wonderful sonifications of all the global earthquakes that have happened in the last few decades. And you just get this sense of how alive the planet is by listening to it that you don't really appreciate when you're just staring at the same data. So it's a pretty powerful tool actually for education, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with musicians with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Join me in getting to know the fascinating world of Leif Karlstrom, a musician and scientist who combines data sonification in his outstanding collaborative exploration, The Volcano Listening Project. Leif is an earth scientist at the University of Oregon who studies fluid motions in and on volcanoes in glaciers, landscape evolution, and geodynamics. He's also a fantastic violinist and mandolin player, composer, and improviser.The Volcano Listening Project features many great musicians including Billy Contreras, Todd Sickafoose and Laurel Premo. You’ll also hear music from Leif’s fantastic duo Small Town Therapy with Adam Roszkiewicz, from their album Dreams and Circumstances. Learn how sonification can transform data into a powerful tool for scientific discovery and education and hear about Leif’s adventurous life as both a musician and scientist. You can watch this on YouTube or listen to the podcast, and I've also linked the transcript on my website, LeahRoseman.com. It's a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode where you'll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast.
Hey Leif, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Leif Karlstrom:
Thanks. My pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
I've been listening to The Volcano Listening Project album, which I'll say first album, I have a feeling there's going to be more, over quite a long period of time. We talked about doing this interview last year, and then life got in the way and now we came back to it. So it's been so interesting to listen to it over a period of time, much like geologic time. So we're going to get into all this cool stuff with combining your life with being a scientist and a musician. But I was curious, your mom's a professional violinist and your dad's a geologist, right?
Leif Karlstrom:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
But I'm imagining you didn't imagine growing up that you'd end up with these two strands.
Leif Karlstrom:
Well, yeah, that's true. I mean, I guess when I've talked about this before, I sort of almost feel like I haven't done anything new with my life at all, because I sort of took apart from my mom and took apart from my dad, but I guess I have taken it a slightly different direction in some sense. Actually. I come from kind of a line of geoscientists, my grandfather, a geoscientist and actually worked on mapping the moon in his career at the US Geological Survey, and then my dad was also a professor of Earth Science at the University of New Mexico and I retired. So yeah, I sort of feel like I'm carrying the torch in some sense.
Leah Roseman:
Let's just talk about mapping the moon for a minute. In those years, what was it based on?
Leif Karlstrom:
Oh, it was based on photographs and often that's the way geoscientists interact with other planets. That's the data that we have. And you can learn a lot with a sort of geologically informed view of photographs, and so they map out the different deposits and put together a geologic history for the moon. But on that basis,
Leah Roseman:
And I was curious with your name, is there Nordic heritage?
Leif Karlstrom:
There is, I guess Swedish, but it's a ways back. I've never been.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. I was curious about the Nordic fiddling tradition, if you'd been exposed to it.
Leif Karlstrom:
Certainly, yeah. Oh, it's wonderful, wonderful fiddling tradition, and I've dabbled, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but yeah, I love that music.
Leah Roseman:
So you used to keep music and science pretty separate in your life until this project
Leif Karlstrom:
I did, yeah. I started playing violin quite young. Well, I would get maybe normal for Suzuki kids around five. I have a 6-year-old now. We've started him playing violin via Suzuki too, so I, I'm sort of remembering this whole progression, but it was a thing that sort of existed separately from other parts of my life. Even growing up, it was different group of friends, different sort of side of the brain. I would go into music world and stay there, and it wasn't just violin, I guess. In middle school I learned to play guitar and got really into punk rock and played in the ska band for a while in college. I played guitar and violin, jam band, and it's just like this whole thing. And since I've played bluegrass pretty seriously and toured in that capacity, but it's always kind of been a separate life. And so in the last few years since I started this project, this Volcano Listening Project kind of was the first time that I realized that there was some common ground and in fact that there were communities of people who were actually kind of like me that both appreciated both and wanted to engage in both. So it's been really rewarding and really cool. (Music, clip track 2 The Volcano Listening Project, Lava dome failure at Soufrière Hills, Montserrat, 2003)
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I was thinking that from what I understand, when you were in San Francisco and graduate school, you got into the bluegrass community because it's a community, you could just get together and play with people.
Leif Karlstrom:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's the one wonderful thing about, well, folk music in general, but I'd almost say particularly bluegrass, is that it's very participatory that it becomes this thing that everybody wants to do in their spare time on a Friday night. You're not going out to the bars, you're going out to someone's house and playing music till very late at night. And as opposed to other types of folk music, I say it's very participatory in the sense that everybody's getting a chance, it's going around the circle. And from that sense, it's very much a conversation. And so it really is an engaging thing, and you sort of understand how this music persists in our culture and it's so important. And I found that and latched onto that for sure, and found a whole group of people in the Bay Area to play with.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, well, certainly in The Volcano Listening project, we can hear a lot of your different influences, and of course, you're working with great collaborators too, but I found I like to improvise with violin as well, and I found that very interesting. I felt a real kinship with a lot of the stuff you're playing. Now, I think you'd mentioned to me in an email that you're just starting to tour this project.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, that's right. It's been in the works for a while. We started actually, the sort of performance side of this project wasn't the first, well, actually now I'm thinking about it. Maybe it was among the first, it sort of existed in one side of my brain, again, in a separate sort of space. And while I was touring, actually, that's where some of these collaborations started, and we would kind of just try things out on the side, Hey, wouldn't it be fun to play along with some data? And usually open-minded, improvisationally minded musicians love that idea, almost like full stop, no exceptions. It was like, oh, yeah, that sounds great. And so I would try things out. I was still kind of figuring out how to turn the data into sounds, right. That's a whole other side of this project is taking the data that's collected at volcanoes and sonifying it, but once it's there, then you can kind of read it as another voice in an ensemble and then do whatever you want with it. And that has been a whole journey in some sense. That's the motivation for the album, actually, is just to explore a lot of different ways to interact with data musically.
So yes, it's been a whole journey. I guess to get back to your question about the touring part of it, yeah, we've gradually put together not only tracks and compositions, but also just in a sort of framework for presenting the music, not an obvious thing, and also not obvious how you would put together a show in this space. It's kind of, yeah, sort. I've come to appreciate that it's an example of this crossover, and it's sort of tricky because you can either sell it as a science, open science, informal science event, or you can sell it as a new music event. And there's not a whole lot of overlap in that space. I have managed to convince some people that there is, and so actually starting in January, we're going to have a run of shows in the Pacific Northwest with a wonderful band that are put together for that. So I'm really excited. (Music clip track 12 Large earthquakes during caldera collapse, Kilauea, 2018)
Leah Roseman:
And musically speaking, so there's going to be improvisation, but with some guidelines or just how are you working that out?
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, well, so I mean, it's a work in progress, I should say that I'm glad that we have until January until I have to get on stage for an extended period and do this. But yeah, the baseline concept is that you're treating the volcanic data as a musical director almost, that it's like you're taking cues from whatever changes happen in the data. And for an improviser, that's a pretty familiar thing because constantly listening and you're constantly reacting, and you're used to doing this on a pretty fast basis. And so this is just a different format for that type of interaction. There's no harmonic guidelines often, so that's why it sort of exists in a bit of a new music space, 'causse it can sound a little dissonant at times, but we've also experimented with giving harmonic guidelines. I've even made charts for some things where I even write out sort of rough chord progressions or at least key centers or tonal centers.
We agree on scales, for example, which is common language for jazz, but it's something that we have to come up with in this case for the sonified data. And so for each sort of piece, each sort of presentation, there'll be a bit of a different theme. Some of them are real compositions, I should say. One approach to volcano music, if you want to call it that, is to take the data at face value and compose around it. And there are examples of that on the record where I essentially gave pieces of data to different musicians who I admire mostly as well as myself, and give them free reign. Say, you can improvise to this, you can compose to it. I don't care what instrument you play, have fun. And so it's been a real treat to see what people do and the composition aspect of things. Sometimes it's even notated. And I have a couple of examples on the record where there was a score that was written down for this piece, and so you could perform that score. And so we'll do some of that too in the show.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious about the track with Billy Contreras because he's over dubbing himself, and although he's a great jazz musician, it sounds more through composed.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, I think that's right. I talked with Billy about his process a little bit, and that's an example I think where he sort of took this and almost very scientifically, I think actually approached it. He sent me some notes where he went through and sort of first listened to the track. It was sonified seismic data from Mount St. Helen's from an eruption in 2004. Not the big one that most people are familiar with, but a later one that happened in 2004. And there's this whole sequence of earthquakes, they're called drumbeat earthquakes. It's quite exciting sequence of data to listen to on its own, actually. But he went through that track, and I think it ends up being, I forget, something like four minutes in duration and sort of annotated what he felt like was going on volcanologically, right? No input from me. But he sort of annotated, this sounds like rock falls and violent explosions and things like this.
His own interpretation of the data, which by the way is what scientists do just period. So great example of the between creative process in music and science. So he went through and annotated that and then composed around it and laid down three tracks. And it's a through composed piece of music. I mean, wonderful virtuosic playing, but also just really interesting interpretations of this arc of the earthquakes sort of as they lead up to an explosion or an eruption event. And I mean, someone else given the same data track would compose something completely different. And that's part of the fun of this, is that it really can have any number of lives and the creative process is just right forefront. (Music Billy Contreras with clip track 4 Mount Saint Helens drumbeat seismicity and eruption, 2004)
Leah Roseman:
And I think I'll say to the listeners right now that we're going to have pretty short clips. None of the tracks are super long, but we don't want to give away the whole album in the podcast, so people can just click right on the link to your Bandcamp and get the album there to listen to. So it'd just be nice to give people a taste. So they're intrigued. Actually, the album cover is this beautiful painting, the oil painting by Rachel, did she say Sager?
Leif Karlstrom:
Sager, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So is she a friend? How did this
Leif Karlstrom:
She's a friend. Yeah. So this came out of, again, sort of Bay area scene from when I lived there. And she, I think is well suited to this project. She has a whole series where she's painting abstract explosions, and I bought a painting from her years ago just because I liked it aesthetically, and when I was putting together the record thought that it would be a perfect album cover, so she was happy to be involved.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah,
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Let's talk about the sonification of the data. There's different methods you're using. Yeah,
Leif Karlstrom:
Absolutely. Yeah, so I guess sonification is in some sense a whole field of science or of signal processing, or however you want to call it, computer music. And I think the way to break it down in some sense is to sort of recognize that there's different types of data that are out there. Some data might document something that's changing through time, so you would plot on a XY axis, some sort of curve that's documenting, I don't know, temperature going up and down, for example, throughout the day. That's one type of data. Another type of data would be like event data, stuff happens, they're localized events, they happen in time. There's different sort of qualities to those events, sizes, loudness, all sorts of things that can be attached to each event, but it's fundamentally different than a line. And then finally, I guess from the standpoint of sonification, there's a third type of data, which is just data that's naturally in sort of a wave waveform type format.
So seismic data or infrasound data or audio data. What we're doing right now, recording through a microphone is data, but for seismic data, that waveform exists below the band of human hearing. So we can hear frequencies between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz roughly. And seismic data, for the most part, lives below that 20 hertz band. And so you can listen to that data if you just speed it up. And so that's in some sense, the easiest type of sonification. People sometimes call it just audification, where you, you're re-sampling the data, you're just speeding it up until you can hear it, until it's in the audible band. And if you're interested in ultrasonic frequencies, then you would slow it down. But either way, you're sort of manipulating the sampling rate until it's within the band of human hearing. And that's a satisfying one because then you can just perceive the data directly.
You don't have to do anything to it. You don't have to make any choices except for that speed factor. These other types of data, you do have to make choices. And so there's a bit of a creative process there. You can choose to associate, I don't know the value of say, temperature going up and down throughout a day with a frequency, if you like. And so it just sort of goes up and down and you hear different pitches. And then there's a whole world in there, of course. And the audio engineering folks will be quite familiar with that, all the different parameters involved in sound design. And so there's a lot of crossover actually with computer music. And again, with audio engineering sound design tools, we sometimes use the same software, digital audio workstations, Ableton Max, these sort of classic tools for computer music come up in sonification too.
And so we do that for the time series data, and you have to do that even more with the event data because there's nothing really guiding you as to how that should be translated into sound. You have to make a choice. Am I going to associate, what value am I going to associate with a pitch or what's the quality of the sound, the timbre, so forth. So it really is a sound design exercise, but you're still guided by the data. And I guess the through going concept, at least in my approach to sonification, is that one should still be able to learn something from the data I have my science hat on at the same time as I have my sound design or music hat on in the sense that there are things that one can discover about the underlying volcanic processes and the things that are generating the data by listening to it. So purely from the science realm, this could be a mode of discovery, and we want to enable science and new understanding in this way. So you can't obscure those things in the data. That's the goal.
It becomes a pretty challenging exercise in that sense then, because sometimes you have to make aesthetic choices, and so you do have to sort of choose in some sense. But I think both can then coexist and the best, I think you can sort of listen to on many levels, you can listen to it just purely aesthetically, just appreciate that this is a piece of music. Or you can listen to it from an expert scientific volcanological standpoint and be like, oh yeah, I hear this thing, this physical process, and oh, is that something new that hasn't been discovered before? I think all of those things can coexist, actually can both be beautiful music and something that you're learning from.
Leah Roseman:
So in your role at the university, I assume you're teaching?
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Are you using any of this sonification to engage with your students?
Leif Karlstrom:
For sure, yeah, all the time. I would say even beyond university teaching, my role as an academic I think is both to, well, I guess formally job description wise, I do research, I teach and I do service, and that service includes giving talks to the public and so forth. And I sort of feel like Sonification is this slightly subversive way to communicate science. And I'll say this even for students, that you slap up a graph with a line onto the board or onto the screen, and some subset of people will just tune out immediately. And that increases exponentially as you get into the general public, is that people are just sort of tune out science for whatever reason. There's cultural reasons for this, but when you hear something, it elicits an emotional response. And so you're kind of drawn in. And I've found that that's a really effective way to get people to engage with whatever it is that we're talking about, whether it's, I dunno, earthquakes that have, there's some wonderful sonification of all the global earthquakes that have happened in the last few decades, and you just get this sense of how alive the planet is by listening to it that you don't really appreciate when you're just staring at the same data.
So it's a pretty powerful tool actually for education, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I've had a few people on the podcast who use field recordings in various ways, and I'm always entranced by field recordings. I find it really takes you, so at the very first track, in the very last track I think on this album are just adorned field recording. So walkthrough fresh tephra, I think is the first one.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. (clip of track1 A walk through fresh tephra)
Leah Roseman:
So maybe you could just, do you have any stories from maybe memorable visits to volcanoes or geologic action?
Leif Karlstrom:
Sure, yeah, yeah. No, it's a very powerful thing. There's Hawaii features prominently on this record. It's a place that I've done a lot of field work over the last decade or so. That's where that first track was recorded. Most people probably will remember in 2018, there was a rather dramatic eruption that happened where basically a volcano started erupting in a neighborhood on the flank of Kilauea. And we visited that site, the place where the volcano erupted essentially in someone's backyard buried a house or two, but we visited the backyard that's sort of closest to the volcano. And tephra is sort of a technical term for a volcanic product that's sort of like bits of magma that have ripped apart upon eruption, little sort of, they're not quite cinders, it's actually just fresh glass. And so not a place you want to walk around barefoot, for example. But if you walk around, there's a crunching sound, right? That's what you hear in that first track, almost sounds like you're walking through snow, but there are some differences. Listen to yourself walking through snow and then listen to that track and you will notice some differences. There's definitely a more metallic texture to the steps that you have, and it's quite a surreal experience actually. You have these houses that have been buried up to here and you're walking around on the glass, right? It's long cooled, the eruption's not happening, but it gives you a sense for how powerful things are. I guess another good story is where some of this data came from. Prior to 2018, I had the chance to visit the summit of Kilauea. I was doing some research and got the opportunity to out with some of the US geological survey scientists who were doing morning, very early morning like 3:00 AM rounds around the instruments, making sure everything was working and so forth. That case we got to walk right up to the rim of the boiling lava lake. And that's an incredible, incredible experience because you sort of feel it, it's almost like the hum of the earth that we're trying to convey with the sonification, but you just sort of feel it in your body as you're walking up. It's this kind of deep rumbling, and then of course you get to the edge and it's like all this lava beneath you, and it's a pretty intense, intense thing. And one of the feelings that would hope to convey with the sonification is just sort of how alive the earth is and convey a sense of wonder at least, and curiosity about what's behind that. As one tries to understand how volcanoes work.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking the exposure to these powerful experiences. Do you have volcano dreams sometimes?
Leif Karlstrom:
That's a good question. I've long had very abstract dreams of things like this. I dream in colors sometimes, and some of my earliest very scary dreams are ones where I just sort of feel like I'm enveloped in colors and those stick with me. I don't think necessarily volcanoes explicitly feature, but I think those same feelings are elicited for sure. It's just this sense that you're very small and if nothing else, as an earth scientist, that's a feeling that one becomes used to in many, many ways that were very small compared to the earth.
Leah Roseman:
So these dreams are abstract art kind of very abstract.
Leif Karlstrom:
Very abstract. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
That's interesting. I've had a couple like that, but not, I don't think it's that common.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah. Well, you remember the scary ones, or at least I do. I'm sure I've had many more. But yeah, this sort of feeling helpless, surrounded by color, definitely a dream.
Leah Roseman:
Let's talk about your instrument collection. You have a beautiful five string acoustic, you play a lot, but you also play mandolin. And do you want to talk about your instruments?
Leif Karlstrom:
Sure, yeah. I have four or five violins of various stripes. When I got from my mother, sort of the first real instrument that I had, I went to college for violin as well as physics, so I have a performance degree, and that was the violin that I played classical music on and started to play bluegrass on all through college. Classical instruments are set up in a much different way in some sense than fiddles. And bridge, as an example, is a lot rounder. And so once I started playing fiddle music, I sort of realized that and eventually kind of found my way to this five string, which is made by Barry Dudley. And these five strings are sort of weird instruments because while there's like hundreds of years of design that's gone into the violin, the five strings sort of throws a bit of that out the window and tries to tack on this E string, which is not suited to the body size and shape so well. And so the few people who have figured out how to make good five strings all have sort different strategies. I sort of feel like, and Barry described to me some of his strategy, which is sort of interesting. I'm not an instrument maker at all, but just thinking about from a more physics standpoint, how do you make the resonance of the C string play with the resonance of the E string, is not an easy thing. And his solution to that in some sense was to keep the body size fairly small, but change the curvature of the top. And it works pretty well. I like that instrument a lot, but five strings are very a different, so the different makers all seem to come up with different ways to solve this problem. I have a couple of mandolins. I have a wonderful pre-war guitar that I've gotten to know and love over the last couple of years. Yeah, I don't know. Banjos, got lots of instruments. My wife also plays, so our house is filled with instruments.
Leah Roseman:
So the bridge, I did not know this about fiddle setup, so it's flatter to make it easier for double stops.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, I mean, I think it certainly makes double stops easier right out of the gate. I think it probably has some disadvantages too, in terms of projection. I think in general, like a nice classical violin, play it over an orchestra and you can hear it and fiddles tend to be a little bit less dynamic in that sense. And I think the bridge contributes to that. But I'm not an expert.
Leah Roseman:
I just never run across that. So you have so many great collaborators on this album, and I believe so let me just take a second here. Yeah. You have this Small Town Therapy duo with Adam Roszkiewicz and he's on this project. And you guys, did you want to include, because you have an album from a while ago with him and you're doing new projects with him as well, or is it all integrated with this?
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, so Adam and I have a really long musical partnership. He lived in the Bay Area and I met him there. So we've been playing, gosh, a number of years over 10 years now, a variety of different ensembles. The bluegrass band that we toured with called Front Country, he was a member of that. We played in some sort of country and honky tonk type bands. And then we started this duo called Small Town Therapy, as you mentioned, and have a couple of records that we made and are actually working on a new one right now, with Small Town Therapy, so that's cool. (Music clip of Small Town Therapy track 7 from Dreams and Circumstances “33”)
But yeah, I guess he's a great example of a musician who's constantly evolving. He is sort of formally trained as a guitar, classical guitar player, learned mandolin, became quite proficient at that. And then when the world shut down during COVID, he decided that he was going to learn synthesizers and computer music and production and a sense become quite adept in that world too, modular synthesizers and things like this. And so we've evolved in parallel because a lot of those same tools and a lot of those same techniques are what we use in the Sonification, and so we've just been exploring that together, him more firmly in the music side and me on the data side. But yeah, he's a strong collaborator on this project. He's going to be on the tour that we do. It's going to help design a lot of the visual aspects that we're going to present along with the music that's kind of part of this tour that's a little bit different. And so we're going to try and kind of present some animations and some sort of reactive visual elements as well. But Adam's a good friend and a longtime collaborator. Yeah, Small Town Therapy, very much compositionally driven with some improvisation thrown in, multi instrumental all over the place, but mostly in the kind of new acoustic music realm.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I understand he came up with the name.
Leif Karlstrom:
He did. He did. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
It's a great band name.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I've linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you with Joe K. Walsh, Anthony Brandt, Karen Power, Lawrence English, and Marilyn Lerner. It's my privilege to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time. Please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page. You'll find the links in the show notes for the merch. It features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly, and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs, and more everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page, you can buy me one coffee or every month. You'll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you'll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you're finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend? Thanks.
Okay. We didn't really talk about this. I understand sometimes with the sonification, there'll be features and the scientists don't really know what this is.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess with my research hat on, that's what I do all day every day, is think about how to understand these really complicated earth systems. And sonification, I guess one way to think about data and our experience with it is with our senses as sensors, our eyes are like an optical sensor, and our ears are also a sensor, and they have different strengths and weaknesses. Actually, for example, our eyes are not so good at resolving temporal changes. The example to give there is if you move your hand in front of your face rapidly, it's blurry. Movies, 30 frames per second is how the sample rate that seems sufficient for movies. If you think about the sample rate for audio, it's 44 kilohertz, so several orders of magnitude, higher sample rate, and that's because your ears are much more attuned to temporal changes than your eyes.
And so as sensors, if we want to understand time evolution of complex systems, your ears are actually better suited in some sense as sensors for understanding that data. And we can speculate on evolutionary reasons for that. If you have some object flying at your head, you'd like to be able to react in times. It was like, that's how I understand it anyway. But yeah, I guess when it comes down to it, you can hear things in terms of change that are quite subtle, and so that can be used in a scientific context. We're not trained to use our ears to interpret data, and even those of us with musical training, I should say, are not necessarily any better at this than anyone else. We can certainly interpret changes, but from a scientific standpoint, that's like we have no training. There's no basis for this. And so it's sort of tricky.
One question that I often get when I present sonifications to a sort of academic audience in research talks to other experts is they're like, this is cool. This sounds great. Did you learn anything? And that's a hard question actually, because in some sense, when I go to try and learn something, I always find myself going back to the visual element of it. It's like, well, I heard this, but now let's use our traditional tools to make sure I understand it. And it's like, well, is that actually learning something? And so I guess in some sense, what you're doing is you're identifying features that you maybe didn't recognize by other means. And so that's one of the ways in which we learn new things through sonification or from the process of data sonification, is by examining the data with a new set of sensors, oftentimes you recognize things that you wouldn't have otherwise.
You oftentimes still have to go back and use the full set of tools, your traditional tools to make sense of that stuff. But I've certainly found things that took much, much longer to find visually, and you hear it the first time listening to it. And so I think there's a lot of potential there in this world where we kind of have machine learning and these sorts of computational approaches to processing large data sets are becoming more and more common. There's a role for sonification in the sense that you identify the important features of a signal in this way, and so it can just become one of your tools as a researcher, I think is my view. (Music clip of track 7 Seismic cycles of caldera collapse, Kilauea, 2018)
Leah Roseman:
It, it'd be interesting, I think, for people to hear about how you've integrated your musical life and your scientific life. There was a period of time where you were touring full time. Did you take a break between degrees or how did that work?
Leif Karlstrom:
No. Well, let's see. I guess I was done with my degrees at that point, and so I felt like I needed a break in some sense. And also just the opportunities came up, and I think any musician would sympathize with that. You react as the opportunities come up. And in this case, the timing was such that the opportunities to do music more seriously sort of ramped up as I was finishing school. And so there was a natural break point for a bit.
Leah Roseman:
So I was curious, you toured in Europe, you were in the UK, the Isle of Man, is that right?
Leif Karlstrom:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
Do you have any touring stories or impressions from that time?
Leif Karlstrom:
I mean, I guess the thing about touring is it's very hard in some sense physically, it's very hard. It's also financially pretty hard. It's a thing that you really have to commit to doing, and it becomes a lifestyle. It's a wonderful way to see the world. You see the world through the back alleys and green rooms and so forth, and you see a cross section of people. That's an amazing cross section of people. Those who are dedicating their lives to music in one form or another, whether it's promoting or seeing or performing, those are all amazing people. Music is a hard road to hoe any way you do it. And so the folks that kind of take that route and to be interesting and cool, I guess the first big UK tour we did as Front Country, one of the things that I guess I remember about it just is how grueling it was sort of like a month where you're sort of just day after day kind of moving around and trying to be as frugal as possible because the margins are super small, so you're just sort of waiting, really. It's like the highlight of your day is those few hours where you're playing and everything else is leading up to that. It is worth it. It's an incredible experience, but it's also a thing. It's not for everybody. You have to have a tolerance for poor sleep and adverse conditions in various ways, but incredibly fulfilling. And there's nothing really like it, to be honest, in my experience. So no regrets there.
Leah Roseman:
I know I've had this experience in other musicians I've talked to. When you're touring, you'd get super disoriented if you wake up in the night, you don't know where you are.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, I've done a lot of traveling in my life, period. So that part of it hasn't been, actually also had a part of my life where I was very into sort of outdoor things, like I was rock climbing and was used to sleeping on adverse surfaces, I suppose, and traveling through the night and having weird hours in that context. And so I don't think that was the hard part for me, actually. I also sort of thought that all those things would prepare me for having a kid because I would be able to sustain multiple nights without much sleep. It turns out that's not true at all. It's way harder having a kid. But yeah, I mean, it definitely, it's a transient lifestyle, and so you either thrive in that or you don't. It's not for everybody, but you can't adjust. And I think the music keeps you motivated and keeps you coming back.
Leah Roseman:
So when you were doing your undergrad dual degree, that's a pretty hard thing to do. How did you manage it?
Leif Karlstrom:
I don't know. I guess I sort of just felt like this was something that I wanted to do, and so just had a lot of motivation. And so I think when you, you're really motivated about things, you can sort of put in the hours and it was a lot of hours. I would take a lot of credits for a sustained amount of time. And yeah, I just found 'em pretty fulfilling, I guess. So it worked.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You mentioned your wife is a musician and you have kids now. I was curious how music looks or sounds in your family.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I have a 6-year-old and I mentioned starting him playing violin, and he's sort of seen music his whole life. In our house. We have people over, we sort of definitely view that sort of social aspect of music as important. So a lot of our friends also are musicians, and so he's seen it. It's definitely early on in his life, it was not necessarily a thing he gravitated to. It was the thing that took us away from him. And so I think he has a love hate relationship with us playing music, but he'll discover it. And I think one of the benefits of having that in the house is it just comes. He just has an understanding of what it is and who musicians are, and they're his family and all of his friends. So I think whether or not he chooses to become a musician, it's a positive thing and we're going to continue sort of pushing it until he says no. And in that case, it's his choice. Worst possible thing is to force music on someone who doesn't want that. But having the opportunity is a pretty cool thing. At least that was for me.
Leah Roseman:
So although your mom's a violinist and a violent teacher, she didn't teach you?
Leif Karlstrom:
No. Yeah, she didn't. Thankfully I would've quit. But
Leah Roseman:
She didn't practice with you?
Leif Karlstrom:
Well, so Suzuki is this method where there is a lot of parent involvement. So early on for sure, she'd be practicing with me. She's a Suzuki teacher, and actually my sister is also a professional musician and is a full-time Suzuki teacher in the Albuquerque public schools as well as privately. So these things are part of the family on my side. But yeah, very much there is this notion that you don't teach your own kids. And I currently, for my son at least Suzuki, is this method where the parent is quite involved early on, and my wife has elected to do that in part so that there's a separation. I'm a little too close.
Leah Roseman:
If we could just dig into the album a little more. I was curious, this track 650 years of global explosive eruptions, is that looking at data from that long ago? How did that work?
Leif Karlstrom:
That's right. Yeah. So part of the science of volcanology is figuring out when volcanoes erupted through time, how they tick. They operate on a much longer timescale than humans in many cases. So we have some examples every day. Of course, there are some number of volcanoes erupting somewhere in the world, but if you look at any one volcano, it might be ends hundreds, even thousands of years between eruptions. And so putting together a record of those eruptions is a big part of volcano science. And so there's this database that we used of the explosive eruptions that have happened. It's actually a much, much longer time period. I picked the last 650 years just to give it some historical context. But yeah, we took that as an example of event data, so that database would have when each eruption happened, but also how big it was, the type of magma that erupted, the type of volcano that it erupted from.
And I think all of those aspects went into the sound design for that, that we basically chose a sound event basically that would sort of, it's loudness would map to one parameter. Its pitch would map to another parameter, and then its timbre would map to still another. And I'll share with you, I have sort of a video of that sonification on its own with a key, which is helpful when you're trying to understand the representation of data through sound, is to have a little bit of an oral key where it says, this is what you should listen for going forward. This is how loudness maps to magnitude and how pitch maps to X and Y. And so those things are helpful. And so that dataset we generated. So with the sound design, you basically come up with a big list of little clips, little sound clips, and then we write a computer program using Python to take those little clips and associate them with the dataset where all your eruptions are occurring, and then it produces a sound at the end. And that's the track that we then gave to Stash Wyslouch, who chose to compose a piece of music. And again, like the Billy Contreras case, he overdubbed himself to that very cool stuff, beautiful piece of music that he came up with. (Music clip Stash Wyslouch track 3 650 years of global explosive eruptions)
Leah Roseman:
So Joe Brent from Adhyoropa records put us together. Really grateful to him, I have to say. He said this was one of the coolest projects ever, and they're going to put an add-on to this album.
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, that's right. So one of the things that I've noticed in presenting this music is that oftentimes people are just interested in listening to the data, which makes sense. It's unique. There's some strange sounds there. And so we're going to post sort of an add-on, I guess, yeah, just the raw unadorned data sonification that you can listen to as well.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And maybe jam to.
Leif Karlstrom:
Sure, yeah, absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, so Laurel Premo is the only vocalist on this. So did you know her personally? How did that work?
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, so Laurel, I had met through touring. It's the case of most of the musicians on the record. We meet through musical channels, I suppose, and Laurel, yeah, we had done some work actually again, Small Town Therapy. We had done some work with a songwriting duo called The Lowest Pair out of Olympia, Washington. Made a record with them actually during COVID as well, and did some touring around that afterwards. And Laurel met in Minneapolis when we played a show there. And then I followed up and yeah, I mean, didn't give any direction in terms of the instrumentation, and Laurel chose to compose a poem and sing it, and it's incredibly powerful and cool, but was unexpected on my part for sure.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, some of these people, they must've been pretty surprised to hear from you with this project.
Leif Karlstrom:
Probably. I don't know. Yeah, it's fairly unique. I think at least in this world. There's probably more in the kind of avant-garde music space where there's a lot more crossover between acoustic instruments and electronic instruments. But certainly in the folk space there's not a whole lot. So it comes as a bit of a surprise, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. (Music clip of Laurel Premo with clip track 10 Lightning and the ash plume of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha-apai, 2022)
So in terms of music in your, I mean, you're so busy as a researcher and a professor and a dad, how are you fitting playing into your life?
Leif Karlstrom:
I guess you have to carve out time for it, and you have to prioritize it. And I think just as any musician does, I react to opportunities and try to generate those opportunities by staying relevant in some sense. And I think as you progress in your career as a musician, staying relevant means just staying in touch with people, making those connections, make sure you're playing music. I go to festivals now and I've taken my kid festivals, and that's a great way to experience music from the playing side. I don't necessarily go, I of course go to hear performers, but bluegrass festivals have this great tradition of playing in the campgrounds. For example, I went to the California Bluegrass Association Father's Day Festival in June and just stayed up playing music all night. And that's a great way of staying connected to people staying relevant.
Leah Roseman:
And you played up in Alaska festivals there?
Leif Karlstrom:
Yeah, let's see. I guess recently played at the Alaska Folk Fest in Juneau. And actually even prior to that, I did a little bit of touring with a band called Hot Buttered Rum out of the Bay Area Bluegrass Band. And so yeah, we actually got to go to Juno twice in a month, which was sort of fun for music. But yeah, the Alaska Folk Festival in Juneau is one of these sort of amazing events that happens mostly indoors, sort of winter and cold and rainy,
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I was wondering about that
Leif Karlstrom:
It's wonderful, but happens mostly indoors. And it's an amazing festival because it sort of embodies this element of music. They only hire one band, and yet many, many professional musicians choose to go there, mostly just because it's a wonderful place to connect and play. And so you just hang out in hotel rooms playing music for the weekends, and it's a great experience. It's a really cool community up there. Alaska has a wonderful folk music community.
Leah Roseman:
Okay,
Leif Karlstrom:
For sure.
Leah Roseman:
So Leif, there's a lot of tracks we didn't talk about. There's a lot of collaborators. I'm happy to address anything and include anything you'd like.
Leif Karlstrom:
I mean, you've touched on a lot of good stuff. I mean, the record, I guess I do intend to do a follow up. It sort of feels like this is going to be a life project in some sense. We're having both progress on the data sonification side, we're generating new sounds, and then once we generate those sounds, be reaching out to more people and seeing what they have to contribute. One of the real rewarding things about this record was to get to work with Todd Sickafoose, who mixed the record and also played on a couple of tracks. Todd, I think sort of in some sense validates the whole approach to me because he's somebody who I've looked up to for many years, and again, met in the Bay Area, but he's got quite a career of his own plays bass with Ani DeFranco and has for years and sort of A-list New York jazz sessions guy, just amazing musician, producer, and lives in Eugene as it happens now, maybe for similar reasons to me, is raising a family there. So we've connected and played music together and he agreed to mix the record and just added so much to it. And I think it's going to be part of the touring band as well, though. Todd will be playing bass, got to work with Idit Shner and Johnny Rogers, who are two Eugene-ights. Idit is a saxophone professor at the University of Oregon. Johnny Rogers, another transplanted New York City musician, plays tuned glass, so like an instrument that he built himself, which is quite virtuosic, and they'll all be in the band as well. So it's going to be amazing band. So I hope that people come out and check out the shows. We're going to be playing in Portland, we're going to be playing in the Hood River in Eugene, probably some other places as well. So I'll advertise that
Leah Roseman:
Yeah,
Leif Karlstrom:
When it comes out.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks so much for this today. Really appreciated it.
Leif Karlstrom:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
