Birds, data, and violins

Matthew Suttor turns bird flight data into music, inspiring young musicians to explore climate change through AI, sound, and storytelling.

One day last spring, composer and educator Matthew Suttor, program manager at the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), noticed that chimney swifts were roosting on the roof of 149 York Street, in the chimney above his office. This observation of the swifts’ migration to New Haven from South America might have gone unobserved by others, but not by Suttor, who mused on “how the world works in mysterious ways.”

His words link directly to his career at Yale, where he takes the collective movement of birds (or murmuration), combines it with environmental data-mapping and artificial intelligence, and translates it into music. Murmuration becomes a metaphor and model for understanding climate change and the reason that Suttor, Professor Richard Prum, and graduate students Cody Limber and Arata Honda eventually climbed to the roof to film the chimney swifts. They captured the birds’ swirling formation into a vortex above the chimney before they funneled inside to roost for the night, and the team is now analyzing the flight statistics and setting them to music.

The project culminated in a two-day event called “Listening to Climate Change” that was held at CCAM on April 25 and 26. Original compositions were performed by the Haven String Quartet during a concert on Friday, April 25, and that evening, students from Suttor’s Yale course and Music Haven students presented their compositions based on collected data from fireflies, glacial streams, coral reefs, surf at Lighthouse Point, and whale song.

After the event, Music Haven high-school violinist Leo Valdez, said the project opened his eyes to musical patterns in nature. “It makes me believe that every movement can have a melody to it, and every movement is unique,” he said. “It’s either fast or slow, but there’s always a melody to go with it.”

On the wings of birds…and violin strings

Ever since his doctoral days at Columbia University pursuing a degree in music composition, Suttor has been fascinated with intermingling data with sound. It was later while perusing data on pigeons’ flight patterns with Diego Ellis Soto ’24 Ph.D. that they realized the three simple rules of harmony (alignment, cohesion, and separation) could apply to the pigeons’ harmonious positions in flight. Like musical notes, the birds did not arrange themselves too close together to avoid what in musical terms is called dissonance. They were heading in the same direction at the same average speed — the way that Renaissance vocal polyphony and Baroque counterpoint behave, Suttor pointed out.

The emergence of AI enabled Suttor and team to master the art of mapping intricate environmental data to musical criteria, and it is this expertise that they brought to Music Haven’s Matyakubova, a Yale School of Music graduate and violinist, who welcomed the partnership.

“Matthew and I have dreamed about a collaboration like this for years,” said Matyakubova. “Our students began listening to their environment — their own neighborhoods — as part of creating music from the data Matthew presented,” she said. “That was a big moment of excitement for them, even for those who were apprehensive about composing.”

Suttor began holding workshops for Music Haven’s elementary, middle, and high school string players. During the second semester, he arrived every Friday, often with Yale students in tow, to guide the students on how they might musicalize the data he had. Suttor showed the middle-and-high schoolers how the pigeon’s circular flight data looked when mapped on a graph and topologically from above. He explained how to run the data through AI software and then change musical parameters like scale and tempo to create musical composition.

The middle schoolers experimented with the pigeon data and produced a piece they called “Acceptance.” The high schoolers, in addition to their “Pigeons Okay” composition, created “Fahrenheit Fiasco,” reinterpreting the data that fueled Suttor’s violin canon, “No Time to Delay,” which sonifies NASA’s GISTEMP dataset of recorded temperatures on earth from 1880-2022 (NASA’s Climate Spiral).

When Suttor worked with the elementary school students, who were just learning to compose music, he asked them to think about how birds sound in nature and in their imaginations, to draw pictures, and to come up with stories that they could transform into music by using all the sounds that violins can make.

The Haven String Quartet performed the students’ original compositions and Matyakubova noted that excited parents were proud of their children. “It was wonderful to hear the students’ thoughts and observations,” she added. “They are natural climate-change ambassadors.”