Geologists from Planet Earth

Communicating geology as art - Tim Ivanic

• Julie Hollis

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Meet Tim Ivanic, a British-Australian geologist who started life as an artist. Tim fused his passions for rocks and art in the 'Aeon Sounds Project', turning geological data into music and sound: imagine volcanoes as instruments, geological time transformed into sound, the synesthetic transformation of crystals into music. It's a wild, unexpected, and brilliant dive into how science and art can, and should, sing in harmony.

Teaching resources (questions prompts) for 12-16 year olds can be found here: https://www.tes.com/resource-detail/resource-13276404

Julie:

What do you know about geology? What does a geologist do? And who are these people who are so interested in rocks? In this podcast, I ask geologists from around the world to tell the stories that mean the most to them. And, well, it turns out they're not who you might expect. The remarkable things they've done, the experiences they've had and the passion that every one of them feels for the planet that we live on. But it's not about what I think. You decide for yourself. My name is Julie Hollis and you're listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.

Tim:

Hi, I'm Tim. I'm a geologist and I've been working in Scotland for several years and in Australia for 17 years now. Today, I thought a good story would be something that is a little bit on the edge of what I do in my main job as a geologist, interconnected with my desire to communicate science. I decided that one really amazing way to communicate data would actually be through sound and through music. So the idea formed into something we called the Aeon Sounds Project.

Julie:

I suppose a lot of people don't really connect, well, even science and art, but certainly not geology and art. So how did that come about?

Tim:

So I started out my kind of educational life as a actually more of an artist before I became a scientist. My dad's a visual artist and he passed on a lot of kind of artistic view of the world to me as a youngster. And during my school years, I became more of a scientist. I got extremely engaged and extremely captivated by science. But I always had art running along in the background as kind of drawing, photography, and a little bit of music was always with me in terms of art. When I was learning about science as a teenager, there were some extreme moments of realization, just like, wow, that's how things work, or everything starts to click, and just an extreme sense of satisfaction that you now have a better model for reality. What's beneath your feet? Well, geology answers that question a hundred times over. It tells you more than you possibly even wanted to know about what's down beneath your feet. But there's all these moments when you're having these kind of mini epiphanies, but you can't share it because you're learning it. You can share with your colleagues, but I think that that's where I felt like this sort of natural desire to sort of go beyond and maybe use some of what I knew from art to be able to transform that knowledge into something more easily shareable. I then got into geology and it was almost like a feedback loop between going out on field trips and getting visual inspiration and learning about geology and the workings of the earth and the cycles of the processes, the grand processes that make our planet what it is. And so I suppose I've always wanted to share that kind of pure kind of joy of this passion of mine of science And I've had art as one of the ways I can express that, which was usually visually.

Julie:

I see.

Tim:

And then this one kind of moment, I was looking at redrawing diagrams, representing data visually, drawing timelines, and looking at my own project work at the Geological Survey here in Australia. And I was... plotting that up as a graph and seeing how I could play with that data. And then the next day, I was looking at a music editing program and seeing all these kind of, you know how they look with these horizontal lines and blocks of color representing like a piano keystroke or a vocal waveform or something like that. And they were all lined up. And it just looked so much like my geological event diagram that I'd plotted up the day before. It, to me, just instantaneously kind of just started to spark off with this concept that, well, what if the volcanoes in this diagram all corresponded to a type of sound or an instrument or something like that? The time axis going from left to right was already the same. I didn't have to change the time axis. It's just the amount of time had to change significantly from seconds to millions of years. But that was one of the kind of fun aspects of the project was this feeling of kind of zooming through time, which seemed fairly natural to me. But any Anyone else I talked to found that extremely weird because geologists think in such a different way about time. We're almost schizophrenic in the way we go from deep time geology, millions, billions of years, and then we talk in social life about what we're going to do later in the evening or what we did yesterday, which is just an absolute fraction of some of these other timeframes. Yeah. So what happened from there? So the idea occurred to me and it kind of just buzzed around in my head for a while. But that was exciting because it's not often you feel like, wow, has anyone thought of this before? Is this actually an original thought? That's a kind of a rare thing to happen in your life, I expect, certainly in my life. So I thought, well, I'll just look around and see what other people have done. And I found nothing quite like that. A couple of instances where people use the technique called sonification, which is simply just representing data as sound or audio of some kind. So there were actually some geophysicists who studied earthquakes and they took an earthquake sound and they didn't actually turn it into music. All they did was they brought the sound of the earthquake into the audible part of sound we can hear and played it back so you could hear an earthquake that otherwise you wouldn't have heard. And there were a few other instances where musicians had tried to do similar things. Somebody had created a symphony called the Universe Symphony where It was designed to be absolutely humongous, where the first part of the symphony was all about the dawn of time and the primordial landscape moving forward in time in these eons, kind of like the history of the Earth or the history of the universe. But it was such a grand idea that he never finished it. And I just thought around, like, who do I know who could help, who could... give me some direction here. And my friend James was doing a music PhD, and I thought, well, just see what he thinks about this idea. And at that exact moment in time, when I emailed him, he was attending an interdisciplinary music course in the Canadian Rockies in a retreat in the mountains.

Julie:

Oh, wow.

Tim:

So he just lit up and just said, this is really strange because I'm looking out of my window right now and I'm literally reading the strata of rock rising up above me as though it was a musical score. Oh, wow.

Julie:

That's perfect.

Tim:

So he just had probably the same kind of bang moment that I did, but from a musical perspective. So James, he... had a lot of contacts at York University in the UK in their music department and he just organized an interdisciplinary working group which we met a few times and the first meeting was probably the most exciting because We just put everything on the plate. What can you do? What can you do? There were people there in sound engineering who knew everything about sonification. And there were people who knew more about electronic synthesizers than you could possibly imagine. And my friend James knew a lot about world music and a lot about classical music. And he managed to bring in a lot of people who had different skill sets. So we met up and had this workshop for a full day. And then we also had a performance that would relate to this workshop as well. During the workshop, I think I successfully talked about the idea and talked about the geology behind it, about multiple streams of events and processes happening like volcanoes and sedimentary basins and magma chambers and lots of different processes simultaneously happening. The nature of the data we have, the age information about those processes through time. We also know where the processes happen in a map form. and when they form. So in my mind, I was communicating that to this variety of researchers. And I thought, okay, it'd be simple. You just sort of map one aspect to one aspect of music. So you just take volcanoes through time and map them onto an instrument and you change how that instrument behaves according to literally the numbers in a spreadsheet. And we did actually do a fair bit of that. And that was really just a small stream of what we did. But the musicians and the more artistically minded folks present, they had a different take. They saw some of the visuals I was showing and they instantly reacted to those visuals.

Julie:

I see.

Tim:

And so they thought, okay, instead of just doing what I thought, which was just sort of use geology as like a tape recorder stream of events that just plays out in a linear fashion. They decided to line up some of my photographs that I was showing them of rocks, crystals, geological features. They lined them up and they just started singing. And little did I know, but there's something called graphical notation which is where you have a musical score but instead of notes you have more like gestures or you have dynamics and sometimes you have brush strokes like painted brush strokes so it really is like it's almost like you're painting the music or you're creating visuals to inspire improvisation. So they found it very easy to transcribe a texture that I was seeing in the rock into a texture of sound. This is more common than certainly I had imagined. So we had a few people doing that and we recorded some of those types of versions of this. They're literally sonifying geological data but in a very abstract way and a couple of other completely unexpected outcomes were one singer who james had contacted she has a condition called synath seizure which is where the senses are blended in in the brain where visuals create sound that was her particular brand of synesthesia there's another type which is where sounds create visual hallucinations if you like but this this one was a very again absolutely remarkable chance that this person was able to to join us she she was able to look at a single image of some of my data, some of the microscopic images of crystals. And she would just improvise and you could just hear and you could see with the picture on the screen and listening to her improvising, you could just feel, you know, it transcended sight and sound. You could just feel this resonance that was kind of almost super perception of this geological feature. Wow, that's amazing. So that was one particular... unexpected outcome and the other one was that I gave a presentation on this a year later or so and somebody in the audience was blind and afterwards they came up to me and said that they could hardly believe that suddenly they could see things like graphs in their own mind by listening to the data because I was playing through the data from my mapping area, and I was describing this graph. I didn't realize that he was there, but he said that he's just blown away that he didn't realize he could have this. People talk about graphs all the time, and you'd like to be able to talk about these without relying on sight. So, yeah, that was, again, yeah, very much unexpected. But it shouldn't have been unexpected because, you know, you're representing data in a different way and it actually makes it more accessible to certain people.

Julie:

So there were different kinds of outputs from this project?

Tim:

Yes, I was expecting something with a relatively defined boundary.

Julie:

Yeah.

Tim:

But as soon as we got together, it really expanded significantly my concept of what was possible there and i think that really is something i took home from that workshop we had and i think if you don't talk to a wide group of people with very different experiences you won't end up with this kind of expansion of your boundaries that we had And so I'm kind of very pleased with that, that we didn't just do what I had envisaged, which was a sort of a narrow, a default kind of playback of geological data, which you could say was boring even. But there's definitely interest even in just representing the data and sound. But it was more that you've engaged a wider field of people And it can probably touch people in a much more effective way to have these multiple ideas out there.

Julie:

Yeah, that's really fascinating. I think scientists were always talking about the importance of interdisciplinary work and collaboration, but it usually doesn't go outside the bounds of science. Do you think that this process has any sort of lingering effect on how you interact with your science.

Tim:

A couple of things... about representing things in sound is that you're extremely acutely aware of the gaps in the data because it's silence and you know what your mind does when you have silence your mind starts to wonder and the silence sounds very long so i think when i do listen to data in this way And I really am picking up those gaps, which I wouldn't do visually because your eye is very quick at kind of skipping over the data set and you look for a trend and you draw a line through a trend, which totally ignores the gaps sometimes. It makes certain aspects resonate with you as a geologist, I think, when you do research spends the time with the data rather than flicking through a couple of graphs visually. But yeah, there's a little bit more, I guess, to that question, which is the creative process that I went through. It wasn't really directly related to my job. So it seemed like it wasn't directly valuable to my own organization, for example. In the end, it didn't take a lot of my time to do all this work. And we're talking about a few days here and there. But I do believe it was extremely valuable. I think now, because of that success, I feel like I can now take a lot of different ideas from different fields and sit with them and think about them and kind of let the machinery of my own mind play with these different fields of ideas to think about things in a new way, in a more holistic way, let's say. I think geologists are good candidates for people who can think across physics, chemistry, biology, but also to the level of landscape and geography and geography ecology so geologists already have this kind of ability to draw on many different fields so really what i was doing was just an extension of that type of thinking which and that maybe because i had a slightly artistic background i was able to do that relatively seamlessly like that wasn't a problem to me i think that there's no limit to what counts as art, really. I think if you're very, very passionate in your life about discovering new knowledge, you can easily turn that into art and it can be very communicable.

Julie:

Tim is a British-Australian geologist working for the Geological Survey of Western Australia in Perth. He completed his doctorate on diamonds at the University of Edinburgh in 2007 and since then he's been researching and mapping ancient rocks in the southwest of Australia. Tim is a passionate science communicator who has delivered public talks at the Perth Gem and Mineral Show, York Festival of Ideas and at the Earth Science Week Festival. The earthquake sounds you heard were sonified from Icelandic earthquakes recorded by the Regionet Seismic Network in a project by Cyril Kaplan, Vlastimi Prudelka and Matej Mece. My name's Julie Hollis and you've been listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.