Exploring Umwelt: Lepidoptera and Hidden Soundscapes (loose transcript from a speaking invitation at Stanford)
I don't know if I'm unique in this, but when I was a kid I wished I was an animal. I'd open an enormous encyclopedia of animals, flip the pages, and whatever animal I landed on, I’d pretend to be that animal on that day.
In recent years, I've tried to bridge memories of that childhood longing with my interest in the intersection of art, biology and ecology, and the consideration of diverse sensory experiences, and one of the main threads that's emerged from this exploration involves delving into the hidden visual and auditory worlds that surround us but often go unnoticed. A really classic example of diverse sensory experience is a dog's world full of smells we can't detect, but to go even deeper, there are entire realms of existence at microscopic and nanoscopic scales that lie beyond our direct perception.
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This is actually a nod to zoologist Jakob von Uexküll's concept of umwelt which suggests that each species, and even each individual, lives in its own perceptual world shaped by its sensory capabilities. What's important or noticeable to one species might be completely irrelevant or imperceptible to another, and I've become interested in the ways art coupled with new technologies can play a role in helping us conceptualize such realities beyond our sensory limits.
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I work with sound, music and visuals, so let's start with sound. Sounds are not simply heard, they're experienced. They exist on a spectrum of intimacy and immensity, often bridging these extremes in natural ways we take for granted.
- A soft rainfall on the window and a distant thunder crack
- A pebble dropping in a pond and a cliff face dropping into the sea
- Or more metaphorically, a drumbeat and the sound of a bat echolocating
The bat's echolocation experience might be as rich and complex as our experience of music, but utterly alien to human understanding. In other words, we live in different soundscapes. The bat's auditory umwelt is the result of millions of years of evolutionary adaptation to their ecological niche, which suggests that their auditory experience is likely highly optimized and highly meaningful within their context.
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The fact that human hearing differs greatly from the hearing ranges of other species raises questions about reality and perception. How much of our understanding of the world is shaped by the specific range of frequencies we can detect?
Technological advancements like data sonification and immersive audio systems have made creating and experiencing sound art a richer area for exploring ecological themes. For example, when I'm field recording and I listen through the microphone- most frequently an ambisonic mic these days- it is as though I have an expanded sense of dimension, environment, and auditory capabilities, and my perception of any environment is greatly shifted due to my primary focus shifting from sight to sound.
So, let's do a little listening for about 4 minutes just to get out of our human centered thinking. Generally speaking, human ears are more limited in range compared to many other species, particularly mammals, so don't try to interpret what you're hearing but maybe allow questions to arise as you listen..
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I invite you to close your eyes as you listen.
What you heard is an artistic rendering of the soundscapes of the greater San Francisco Bay Area beginning at 1400 ft above sea level in a douglas fir forest, moving through oak woodland, then down to grassland and to the wetlands, then we then traveled Coastal scrub, sand dunes and the coastline, and finally into the water where we heard the shoreline and concluded in a deep coastal canyon.
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This is a list of most of the voices you heard.
Notably absent were human-made sounds, due to recording and editing techniques I used. The compressed sense of place and time in this soundscape is meant to illustrate the high level of biodiversity in this region and draw attention to the voices of our lovely non-human neighbors. One fascinating sound you may have mistaken for a fog horn is actually a toadfish called a midshipman. This little fish has a number of great stories and oddities associated with it, and leaves one to imagine what this fish's umwelt might truly be like.
(The ocean recordings you heard come courtesy of nonprofit Ocean Conservation Research, who I've been lucky to collaborate with on science communication projects)
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To continue challenging our anthropocentric view of reality, let's dive into the visual world, our primary sense. Just as a bat's umwelt is shaped by echolocation, imagine the "umwelt" of a tardigrade or how about a butterfly.
The butterfly's umwelt is a multisensory experience that includes UV vision, chemical sensing, and possibly magnetic field detection, creating a world perception radically different from ours.
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Butterflies can see ultraviolet light. This means their visual umwelt includes colors and patterns we can't perceive. Their compound eyes provide a different type of visual processing, likely resulting in a very different perception of motion and spatial relationships compared to humans.
A couple of years ago I made two short films with a small team that included an animator and two biologists - specifically geneticists who study evolutionary development - these films focus on the micro and macro through the wings of butterflies and moths.
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"Nanoscapes" was made in close partnership with the Martin Lab at George Washington University.
We colorized still SEM images - taken at up to 50,000x magnification (mostly taken by grad students) and animated them to move to the music we wrote.
One thing I often hear from viewers about Nanoscapes is "this is so beautiful," which is an interesting comment, because that was certainly our intention, but its also interesting how our concept of beauty is tied to our umwelt, and that perhaps exploring beyond our natural perceptual limits can reveal new forms of beauty. An elegant truth, so to speak.
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- Butterfly wings contain intricate nanostructures that create their vibrant colors through structural coloration, rather than pigments.
- These structures, invisible to the naked human eye, interact with light at the nanoscale to produce the colors we see. The nanoscale structures in butterfly wings represent a level of complexity in nature that exists beyond our natural perceptual limits, yet profoundly influences what we can see, such as these images I took at the Patel Lab at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory for the films.
The other short, Biopixels, focuses on the biodiversity and speciation of butterflies and moths. I spent hours glued to the microscope at Woods Hole capturing images from Nipam Patel's collection of 50,000 specimens, later working with animator Brandon MacFarland to bring these stills to life in film. We did not alter the images but merely explored ways to demonstrate the intricacies of speciation.
Some things to consider as you watch this short…
- There are approximately 200,000 species of butterflies and moths (butterflies are actually specialized moths). This multiplicity of umwelten in a single group of insects highlights the vast diversity of experiences in nature, as each species represents a potentially unique umwelt. For example, the diversity of wing patterns can reflect different perceptual worlds such as different UV patterns invisible to our eyes.
- Most butterflies in their adult form only live for 2 - 4 weeks. Thinking back to ourselves day to day, how does our perception of time - or our temporal umwelt - influence our perception of these creatures, much less our understanding of our own lives, biodiversity and evolution?