River Sonification Lab for Imperiled Rivers

Rivers are the arteries of landscapes and are deeply embedded in cultures, economies, and ecosystems worldwide. They offer fresh water, habitat for animals and people, renewable energy, and transportation conduits. They are also critical conduits for pollution, erosion, and flooding. The movement of water and sediment in rivers carves the landscape and creates fertile floodplains. In addition to their spatial threading, rivers also connect time, weaving together the past, present, and future of our planet.

This project addresses the temporal-spatial quality of rivers through sound, a medium of time and resonance. In this project, a team at UVA turns rivers into songs to address fundamental scientific questions about the geometry of flow and erosion.

Several recent developments in land-use law imperil critical river ecosystems. Addressing these imperiled rivers will enable our research to respond to rapidly changing societal discussions promptly. Specifically, this project will focus on Virginia rivers during a sensitive time in Senate wetland law renegotiation, and on the Alaskan North slope river networks under debate for ConocoPhillips’ oil drilling permitting, the Willow project.

Burtner uses a data-driven machine learning approach to sonify a new language of rivers that can be analyzed quantitatively and listened to as a sonic sequence. The sonified river data can also become material for new musical compositions that will connect this scientific research to the public imagination.

The project team is investigating two major approaches to discover how the shapes of rivers are divisible into a geometric “alphabet” that can be defined objectively using machine learning, and if the shapes of river bends are ordered in sequences, analogous to DNA sequences, that encode environmental conditions.

To test this, they will build a database of approximately 100,000 river bends on Earth that span a range of geologic environments and scales, from 10 m to 1 km wide. The project is ideally suited to sonification, allowing a user to listen to large amounts of river data as a sonic sequence. The river sonification lab specifically addresses both discrete and continuous synthesis methods.