About groovedwhale project
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I was first introduced to humpback whales in Alaska in 1996. It was thought with my musician’s ear I could help reveal patterns in the feeding calls that were not readily evident to the scientist. My first musical interaction with the whales was in 1999 in Hawaii. I fed my violin sounds underwater and had a whale come underneath the boat and sing with me. But was I imitating him or he me?
With roots in classical violin and traditional African drumming, my artistic journey spans over 25 years of deep exploration into the biological origins of music and musicality. I bring a hybrid approach to my work, combining artistic intuition with rigorous scientific inquiry. Using tools from artificial intelligence and information theory, I analyze whale song for underlying mathematical patterns—symmetry, repetition, and algorithmic structures—and then translate these findings into new compositional frameworks.
My aim as a composer is to push the rules and boundaries of music and provide insight as to how the possibility of music in other species might be investigated. My goal is to create music that doesn’t just mimic nature, but collaborates with it. By applying non-human constraints to human composition, I aim to build bridges between species and explore the possibility of a shared musical language—one that could even inform the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.