Musical termites? What happens when you let nature sing

Every Friday on Seattle Now, we break down the week's news. This week, Seattle knows how to party, but boy, we left behind a lot of trash at the Seahawks Super Bowl parade. If I do produce trash, I'm going to carry it with me. You're that gal. Yeah, no question. Like, for as long as I need to. I'm a trash gal. Did you see me? Hear that and more on Seattle Now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi Wild listeners, this is a fun episode. I know a lot of you, like myself, are music lovers as well as nature lovers, so we're all in for a treat. Before we start, I want to invite you to join our Patreon, where you can find bonus content that didn't make it into the Wild episodes, and extended interviews and extra bits and pieces with our favourite guests. The link is in the show notes. Okay, enjoy the show. I love music. Maybe you do too. But where this music came from might surprise you. This is from a band made up of insects. No, not the Beatles. That would be way too predictable and way too cheesy a joke. Not Beatles, but something pretty close. Termites. So this was all done by the termites themselves. What you hear is a layer of four different instruments, actually. Three of them are a piano and one is a guitar. This is Dr. Diego Ellis Soto. He's the conductor of this termite band, so to speak. He recorded the movements of eight termites in a petri dish and mapped those movements to play notes on a musical scale. The single guitar player, so termite A, its location on the Petri dish and speed is what determine how these guitar chords were played. And then the piano, it's more the whole collective state of these termites. Are they more asynchronous? Are they transitioning to somewhat of harmony? Definitely some jazz influence there, I think. Music and sounds are very powerful, from chart-topping hits and the tearful climax moments in a movie to a field full of crickets? And it's where these two worlds come together that my conversation sits today. My guest got his PhD at Yale, and now he's a research fellow working on his postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research affiliate at the California Academy of Sciences. He's also a DJ and a musician. Maybe it's the drummer in me. In my case, I think about rhythm and beats all the time. Well, my guest does that kind of thing for a living. He studies the way animals move, like in a flock or a swarm, in part by translating these movements into music. And as a musician, he also uses animal sounds in his music. It's an intoxicating mixture, and his way of trying to understand the natural world. Diego Ellis Soto might just make you think very differently about how you look at, or maybe hear, nature and its creatures. From KUOW in Seattle and Chris Morgan Wildlife, welcome to the wild. Oh, I am so excited to dig in with you. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Because your work, it seems to blur the lines, I think, between your role as a scientist and your fun role as a musician. And where these worlds meet is partly what I want to explore with you. when did you start blending these two passions? Oh, gosh. Music has been a part of me as long as I can remember. I used to play the flute as a little kid, and I remember when discovering that music could be written in sheets, it opened a whole new world for me, and writing my first songs for the flute, and playing with my brother Leo the flute on Mente Vidal Airport, actually, and asking tourists for money. And with that money, we used to buy hats. And there's this picture my parents have of us wearing a hat of Timon and Pumbaa playing the flute. So in hindsight, I believe I was always meant to make music out of animals. I love that. However, the flute quickly transformed into learning how to make music on computers. With my first money working as a research assistant at the university, buying a little electronic keyboard in a music controller and being part of a rap and blue band in Germany that was very short-lived. Whenever I would be able to go on voyages to study where the animals go, where Galapagos giant tortoises move up and down a volcano, I would always carry this gear with me. And this was in Santa Cruz Island. I've been working in the Galapagos since I am 19 years old as a volunteer, and I've never stopped since, and I hope to live and work there forever. And I'm happy to say that this might have been one of the first electronic music songs made at the research station that I was staying there, the Charles Darwin Research Foundation. Right, no one's done it before you. That's not hard to believe. Diego's music with animals takes a few different approaches. The termite song, we heard, was literally created by the termites, by Diego tracking their movements. These early songs by Diego at the Galapagos Research Station were different. He mixed those animal sounds he recorded in the field into music he created. He did that with other species too, and sometimes blends the two. Later in the song, you will probably also hear some birds that I recorded in the Amazon. In the Cuyabino region, which is the flooded Amazon of Ecuador. And at the time, this was all done with cell phone recordings and very frugal instruments, actually. I've always been very passionate about keeping it as basic, as low cost as possible so that everyone can replicate these. We're doing some head popping here. This really is a first for the wild Diego. I love it. I'm getting right in. There's also a song called The Maras on the Move. where I try to recreate wildebeest migration. So you will hear like zebras and wildebeest, and then there's rain, and then there starts to be some hooves. But it was not really until I began my PhD where I learned that there's actually a whole field called data sonification that transforms data of anything from a galaxy up to the sound of termites into music. And there was fairly few experiments that I found on transforming the hidden life of animals into music, actually. So that's the rabbit hole I've been down with collaborators ever since. So you said data sonification. What is that? That is a mouthful of a jargon term. It is. What it basically means, it's turning any type of information into sound. And I will give you two specific examples on how we do this in our day-to-day life. Well, not so day-to-day, I hope, but one of them is a Geigen counter. So to measure radioactivity, it makes noise to tell us whether we have a lot or a little bit of radioactivity. The other one is the Morse code. So it's turning information from our fingertips into sounds. And the third one, I would say, is an EKG in our hospitals. Listening to our heartbeats, we can see, like in all of these movies, the heartbeat going up and down in this medical machine, and we can hear the beep, beep, beep of the heart. That is data sonification examples. This idea of data sonification was a turning point in Diego's career. Could he figure out a way to combine his research data with his music passion? This next trip out to the Galapagos to track tortoises on the side of a volcano would be the test. Giant tortoises are fascinating animals for so many reasons. First of all, some of the giant tortoises that are alive today saw a young Charles Darwin. They were alive when Abraham Lincoln was president, so they really put conservation into perspective. When it rains on this island, giant tortoises know that they have to start a migration to reach fresh vegetation, full and rich of nutrients. So you have giant tortoises that can live over 180 years walking up and down a volcano in Santa Cruz Island every single year. And these are incredible voyages. And as a scientist, I can't help but technology such as these animal collars, tracking devices we put in animal, allows us to get a literal bird's eye view on a giant tortoise and allows us to follow the hidden lives of animals in new ways. But a lot of biologists do that. What were you then doing with that data of the animals that you were tracking? What was the difference? Well, I like to think of animals. If trees are the lungs of the earth, animals are the veins connecting ecosystems. Oh, that's beautiful. And sometimes there's a lot of tension where these animals are going. There's also sometimes some incredible harmony. And I remember in my PhD, as I was getting better at analyzing these data and starting to write scientific publications about the role of giant tortoises, also being curious of, oh, what would this map of tortoises moving up and down sound like? So that was my first in to data sonification. And I created some somewhat predictable compositions of tortoises moving up and down a keyboard in very simplistic ways. But it was not until a true chance encounter with my dear colleague Matthew Sutter, who's a lecturer and a composer at Yale University, on a fire pit over red wine right before the COVID-19 pandemic, where we started talking about how animals behave, how sometimes you see harmony in how a flock of birds fly. and over this chance encounter turned into a long-term collaboration and discovering that actually the rules of how collective group of animals and music theory operate are not that far apart. Having music represent the way animals move in unison drove Diego to learn more about these synchronized patterns It turns out it a question that interested people throughout the ages Aristotle wrote a whole book called The Anima where for a long time actually people thought that especially groups of, say, flocks of birds or schools of fish were actually communicating through telepathy, is what we thought for a long time. However, the rules of groups of animals are fairly simple at the end of the day. animals, if you think about a flock of birds or say Canada geese migrating they don't want to be too close together they don't want to be too far apart and they move at a somewhat similar speed those are essentially the rules of musical harmony if we think about chord progressions our right hand moving alongside a keyboard there's these very similar rules so after this curious fire pit encounter we were quickly joined by another one of my colleagues called Konrad Kaczmarek, who's also a professor at Yale in music. And together we devised a few examples of this. The first one being ten pigeons that were flying around the University of Oxford in a circle. And we used some of these rules of these pigeons not flying too far away, flying somewhat together, to start making a proof-of-concept song. Diego and his colleagues tracked the movement of these ten pigeons and then assigned a note on a computer to each of them. This is what their flight movements sounded like. So the second example that we used were these termites. where we use computer vision of eight termites on a Petri dish. Basically, if we think about the termites, we split that Petri dish into a circular keyboard so that when termites move up and down, they play different notes. However, the chord progressions changes as this group moves from a harmonic state to a more chaotic state. I will say these termites are mostly chaotic and swarming. They're not as harmonious as birds or fish will sound. Ah, that's interesting. Yeah, and you can actually hear the medium at which animals move across the world. So you can hear some of these parameters. And it can get mathy actually very quickly. Mathy? Mathy, did you say? It gets mathy very quickly, yeah. Nightmare for me. People have been very interested about making music and listening to the natural world for a long time, way before me. I am not the first in Notiente, I will say. But what you're saying is that a starling murmuration, for example, might parallel something in music very closely. Is it a very close relationship? Yes, absolutely. And I will say that we're still discovering more and more of these complex relationships. So we are letting nature sing its own songs. So what does studying animal movements like these that we're hearing and those that you're describing tell us about creatures and ecosystems? Is there something to learn from studying the animal movements? I think it fundamentally boils down to the song, Should I Stay or Should I Go? So when should an animal stay? When should they go? When, where, and why? And studying animal movement, whether it's by putting these tiny transmitters on animals and see where the voyages are, or using computer vision on a video and tracking the movement of termites on a petri dish, it allows us to better understand where nature is thriving, such as these giant tortoise migrations, and where they're not, where these veins are getting bottlenecks, for example, and where can we plan targeted conservation interventions or change our day-to-day habits to thrive alongside nature? Because nature is sharing a very crowded planet with us humans. So a movement of animals is really important to better understand how are protected areas connected? How are animals moving in the Anthropocene? Where will species go under climate change? and from a scientific standpoint this is very important to better plan in a rapidly changing world in a world with a more increasing human footprint but it also allows us to share the incredible voyages that animals have and the complexity of their routes the incredible ability that they have to swim fly and navigate across the world every single year trillions of animals are moving across the world. And it's incredible to be able to study this. And we keep finding new secrets on species that migrate that we didn't know. We find new migratory routes. And we are better able to hopefully contribute with a grain of sand on a more sustainable world by doing so. After the break, we'll dig into one of Diego's most ambitious songs and meet another one of his music collaborators, an albino alligator named Claude. laughter, curiosity, and inspiration. Find Meet Me Here on your local KUOW app or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, Wildlings. Thanks so much for tuning into my conversation with Diego Ellis Soto. I hope you're enjoying it. I know I am. I'm also enjoying getting to know some of our patrons who've recently joined and would like to say thanks to Catherine C., Mary Ann J., Kevin P., Kim C., Benjamin W., and Ogdog M. What a great name. Thanks to each of you for helping make episodes like this one possible. If you want to join the wonderful community that's growing fast over on Patreon, you can find the link in the show notes. Okay, back to the show. Dr. Diego Ellis Soto found inspiration for his latest song in a surprising place. The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco had a somewhat unusual mascot on campus, a 300-pound, 10-foot-long albino alligator named Claude. The Bay Area being the Bay Area, Anthropics, so this company that has the large language model called Claude, supported a live stream of Claude the albino alligator on YouTube, providing us with hundreds of hours of footage of Claude. So I thought, this was mostly half-jokingly, How about we turn Claude's movements, these terabytes of data seen on YouTube, into a song so that we can listen to the unofficial mascot of the California Academy of Science's own song. Fantastic. 24-7. my colleague Vivek Harvey Strida at the University of Washington helped me to turn weeks of Klotz movements into these CSV computer files that I could then turn into music I tried to incorporate all of these lessons from the voyages of music exploration to this song. For example, Claude was born in Louisiana, so I had to start the song with swamp sounds of Louisiana. And I asked one of my collaborators, who's a conservation biologist, can you go out of your home and record swamp sounds? And my colleague Teague is his name. He was trying really hard to not breathe, but I really liked his breathing, so I pumped up that sound, and it's also part of the song. It includes the zookeepers calling Claude. I called the song Claude for fun at the beginning, but then the zookeeper of Claude was calling Claude, and I was like, oh my God. Oh, I heard that. Someone shouted his name. Yeah. All of these sounds, all of them, We're recorded at the Cal Academy or in the Swamp Sounds. Okay. That's Claude. It's those kind of chirpy throat sounds, right? Yeah. And we performed the song live during Claude's 30th birthday, which was, I believe, two months ago. Unfortunately, three weeks after we performed that song for Claude's 30th birthday, Claude unexpectedly passed away at 30 years old. And now we're thinking about whether it is possible to have a memorial song of Claude's last days on Earth. and also thinking about can we detect changes through music? Now we could go back and listen. Could we change? Can we detect changes in the day-to-day movement of this alligator in its ground and detect when these changes happen or not? Meaning he was getting sick or close to passing and you might be able to detect that through the sounds prior to him passing. Exactly. That is something that would be very interesting. How are you hoping to inspire people with the story of Claude? Because that's amazing. There's something called the extinction of experience in, I'm going to put my scientist hat on, or my public health hat on again. I love how you actually adjusted your hat there. So two-thirds of humanity is going to live in cities in 2030, and we're at unprecedented rates of climate change. The extinction of experiences says that we're quickly losing touch with our day-to-day nature, which, especially for youth, might be difficult for us to reconnect or to be passionate about conservation and engaging with our day-to-day lives. We're a very visual society, but throughout human evolution, we've been an incredibly auditory society to survive. And getting back to our senses is incredibly good for us, and especially if it's in nature. So you did your PhD work at Yale, and there I know Yale had a farm that you used for an experiment. What did you do there? Yeah, I'm so glad you bring this up because we've been talking a lot about how to turn data of the movement of animals into sound. But of course, anyone who likes birds knows that they're playing their own beautiful song every day by just calling sounds. And that's where I can put my scientist hat on again and say, we actually have some incredible technology as scientists where we can, through artificial intelligence, identify which bird is singing where. So at the Yale Farm through support from the sustainable food program I was able to install some of these receivers that identify birds which I call birds by microphones as a proof of concept of how many birds can we detect with a gear that costs a hundred dollars and we left some of these bird spy microphones for four weeks at the yale farm and we were able to detect over 60 bird species that is six percent of birds of the entire united states in a 1.5 acre urban farm and technology was identifying the calls for you? You were able to run this through some AI system, were you, that revealed that number? Exactly. This is a BurtNet from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, from a very common app that many people in the show listening might have called Merlin. Merlin, I was just going to say, yes. I mean, everybody I know, whether they love nature or not, knows about Merlin. It's such a popular app for obvious reasons. It's so effective and fun to use. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a really nice experience because I used to love going to this urban farm just to disconnect from being in front of a computer screen. Digging my hand in dirt is like therapy sometimes. So it's not just a way of talking about bird biodiversity, but also creating place-based data-driven stories of music. We ended up making a song called D.L. Farm Bird Sing a Song, where we recorded anything from the chicken of the farms to people walking around to American Roberts. I see. So music came from all of the sounds that you were recording as well as the bird species. Oh, I hear a chicken. I love how you've mixed in natural sounds with human sound. You know, I've also used this song sometimes at the end of my lectures, and I found that scientists, we are pretty good at showing maps and graphs and PowerPoints. We rarely use sounds, even though we work with ecosystems that have incredible sounds. So I like to end my talks now sometimes with musical songs or sounds of birds from the ecosystems I'm talking about. It was funny, the first time actually I ever performed that song was at the Yale farm after giving a lecture on urban biodiversity at the farm. So it was a mixture of a scientific talk about the value of green spaces and urban biodiversity in conservation and the fact that there's music everywhere. You do not have to be in the Galapagos Islands to do this and that all of these songs were place-based. So you're out chasing giant tortoises around the Galapagos and birds in the Amazon and Ecuador and creating sick beets at the same time. But is there more to this work? Absolutely. If I think about what made me study biology and want to become a conservation biologist, for example, it had very little to do with science, actually. I hadn't read a scientific paper until I was already in university. It had all to do with emotions and connections and memories and feeling and peace and awe and curiosity. So I think that listening to the hidden lives of animals through music theory and technology, it's all about reconnecting us with nature. It's about awe and curiosity and creating a new language for us to listen to the natural world. Do you see yourself as a musician, DJ first or as a scientist first? different things so i i i'm getting more and more comfortable wearing very different hats depending where i sit because so i believe that introducing myself as a musician or if i'm meeting some people say playing soccer i often don't land with start with hey i'm a scientist i do the x and y and z i find it much easier to connect with people i have a phd from yale i'm doing a post-doctorate in but you're right that's not the opener for every crowd right to make new friends. No, I find, you know, I find music to be such an accessible vehicle of education that is just so apolitical that often allows us to find common ground very quickly instead of trying to find what takes us apart. It's a bridge that doesn't need language. It doesn't matter if you speak Spanish or English or German or Quichua. That termite song will sound the same to you. And I find that aspect, if we think about conservation and reconnecting people with nature, you do not need to be a scientist to be a conservationist. Especially if we teach youth, they're the next generation of park rangers, of decision makers, sure, of scientists, of artists, of activists. To me, conservation can be a person on a community farm teaching about how to grow tomatoes and indirectly improving bird habitat. that it can be, sure, a scientist writing really important publications on how animals move and making some models on how the world works, up to a park ranger. I work with Feli Cabrera, for example, a park ranger in the Galapagos, who to me is the world expert in giant tortoise ecology, who has taught me so much. So I think that finding new ways of communicating how nature works, especially through sound, can help us better understand how to ultimately protect it and how to reconnect it with nature. And I feel like in the last century, the arts and the sciences have gotten a bit more far away than it used to be 200 years ago. I agree about them parting versus coming together. And any scientist that tries to group them together and sort of collaborate, it's always got my attention because I think that's exactly what's needed. So you say that in some settings, you might describe yourself as a musician first, in some settings, a scientist first. I have this struggle because I feel a little bit of both as well. I've got a science background as an ecologist, but I'm also, I love the creative side of my brain. And, you know, I write, you know, including things like the wild and I love music and I'm drawn to that. I love painting and writing and all kinds of things, right? You know, but I've also got this science thing. Sometimes it's a rub. Do you, using both sides of the brain can be difficult. Switching back and forth. Yes. I find quite mentally tiring. Do you, do you find the same and how do you deal with that? I'm learning on the fly sometimes and I'm often, what works for me is I have really great peers from both sides of the arena and I mix and mingle and what pays my salary is my science. So that has to be said. The way that I combine my music now is through service, through environmental education and reconnecting. But also what really helps me with music sometimes it's just you know planning a trip for a certain period of time where i completely immerse myself so when we went to athens georgia to my friend with my friend kai riddle where we actually met really interesting people for example that this leads to three days of completely immersing ourselves into how do we make music can we add the train sound of georgia with this katsu plant And how does this relate to this incredible story that Athens has both in the history of ecology, actually, but also in the history of alternative music? And because I'm a science nerd at heart as well, we always end up doing something of science. Very creative. I think for music, it often takes me activation energy because, you know, we live in a noisy world. it's often hard to find this like space. So I think booking a certain time away is what really helps me. But if you have any advice, I'm all here. Yes, getting very disciplined about it. Yes, scheduling it and doing it very purposefully, I guess. Yes, because I'm also someone who loves silence and just being in nature uninterrupted. And I can never understand it when I see someone going for a walk or a hike and they've got earbuds in listening to something because I want to be immersed in the moment. And so it works in lots of different ways, doesn't it? but switching between them sometimes is tricky. Personally, which side of your brain do you prefer to be in? Gosh, I think because I have been at the university for over a decade studying biology, I would say it's a bit easier for me to put my ecology brain in, but ecology is all about connections between the living and the non-living things. And, you know, if you're in the Galapagos in the field with a machete, you need to use your ears very quickly. or if you're a wildlife biologist in the Amazon, you're going to hear birds all the time and they're going to sound incredible or cicadas. So I think especially field biology and ecology, which unfortunately I'm doing less and less, I'm becoming more of a data analyst as I'm progressing through the ladder. I think it's the combination of both forcing myself to have a field site, to go to the Galapagos once a year, feel very small, forget about all the data analysis and papers I need to write and just being a present, looking at the eyes of a giant tortoise that I might have seen Charles Darwin 200 years ago, slowing down. That's something to think about. Yeah, and then being surrounded with people who are much better musicians than me and learning from them and tinkering on the process. I love your perspective on it. Everything is expensive in Seattle. But when it comes to restaurants, I got a lot of tricks and tips up my sleeve to help diners eat well in the city. I'm Tom Venn, host of Seattle Eats, a food podcast from the Seattle Times and KUOW, part of the NPR Network. I'll share about the latest buzz in the Seattle food scene, like the hottest openings and the best bites that are worth your money. Listen now to Seattle Eats on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. We use sound a lot, of course, in this show because it really draws people in and it makes them feel like they're there with me in nature. It's an important part of what we do. sound is informing and sound is emotional isn't it it's why I love it and I can see it you're giving me goosebumps with some of the things that you're saying Diego because I can relate to where you're coming from because of this emotion that comes with music and with sound music being a form of sound what are you hoping you will accomplish with all of this work gosh I think ultimately it boils down to contributing a grain of sand to the better world for a better world allowing new ways of connecting with the natural world that is not just visual so visually impaired people can now hear two flock of birds listen to fluxes of carbon that is something that actually some rocks of hope taught me that we can talk about later when during an art exhibit or or now either way. I think it's creating these place-based stories that allow us to connect to a certain place and to a certain ecosystem or a certain setting that will never sound the same, that is completely dependent on space and time. So we are both creating new musical instruments, so to speak, or giving nature a different voice through sonifying it, but also creating new ways of artists and youth to connect with the natural world. It seems like this mission to inspire people and connect them to nature is really personal to you. You just mentioned these rocks of hope. I hope you don't mind me asking. I heard that you were quite sick at one point. Can I ask you about that Yeah sure I actually never talked about it in a public setting so i feel like it a good time now it been long enough so in during the middle of my phd at the peak of my career at 29 year olds i was diagnosed with cancer and it needless to say it was a very very hard time and um it was a period of very very high anxiety of encountering some of your biggest fears at a time where you had to socially distance. So few things actually caught me down during that time. Walking to a park called East Rock Park in New Haven, where I would watch some birds and for some times I would feel absolute peace. And then at the same time, I was attending a cancer survival clinic at Smilo Cancer Hospital. And, you know, because I talked too much, I was talking about this animal music with one of the staff members there giving me incredible advice on how to adapt and transition to this really challenging time. And they actually pointed me to the fact that there was a cancer group survivor clinic community that were making these. I brought some of them because it comes back to emotions and not science for me and connecting these rocks of hope. They're called smile rocks. And they were all about nature and music. And I'm just going to read a few because they're so powerful. the songs of the earth write the music of my soul if it weren't for the rocks the stream would have no song and i have a few more here sing the song you were born to sing the birds sing even when it rains listen closely even the trees exhale their own love songs so oh that's beautiful did all of this and your diagnosis influence how you go about what you do did it influence you it must have been a profound impact on perhaps your work or the way you looked at things yeah I think to be completely frank I think it made me less afraid of failure because you know if this whole music thing didn't work out it's not like I have to talk about survival rates or death and so the stakes felt fairly low compared to some of the other things i was experiencing so in that way having survived this taught me an incredible lesson of resilience of of love of being a good trying to be the best person i can and it also showed me that there's people that are going through very very difficult times that are incredibly motivating and inspiring to me and seeing these rocks of hope, and this community was also making origami paper cranes, thousands of them, thinking about animal collective behavior. Immediately I thought about, oh my God, they're making origami paper cranes, which matches perfectly to us thinking about collectives. And I'm going to butcher that. I have to say, Diego, you are somebody that looks at everything and relates it to the work and mission and passion that you have for nature. I can see that. I kind of do the same, like, oh, that reminds me of this. It's a very powerful thing that you have this focus in your life and in your heart. And everything that you look at sort of pulls towards it in a very magnetic way. Is that accurate, you think? Yeah. And I'm a hopeless optimist. So I'm always trying to find some lessons out of whatever happens in life and throws at us. So, you know, I cannot change what happened to me. I wish it never did happen, obviously. and I remember asking, I think it was during like one of these survivor clinic therapy sessions, I was like, these rocks are incredible. I have an art exhibit where I'm going to play animal music at this Tsai city, which was, it's a building that looks like a fish tank, so I called it my fish tank. And I asked if I could lend some of these Smilo rocks in origami caper cranes and they were gifted to me and I remember putting them aside all over the installation and that's when it all sort of came together. We had the termites with headphones so people could see the video of the termites and the music at the same time. Next to it, we had the origami paper cranes and these smile rocks of hope of grounding people with the incredible healing power that nature has. Next to it, we had a little scientific poster about the Yale farm birds. I asked my colleague Matthew and I, who were creating the pigeon song together, to play live. We even had some of my friends who are tango dancers. I told them, if you guys come, you can dance tango. So they all showed up and they danced. No way. So it all came together. That's so fantastic. So it was, I think it is the bigger sum of parts. That is a complex woven group of different things that you've thrown together in one room there that sounds so tantalizing. I can't believe it. And especially the tango dancing on top of it all. Were you monitoring the tango dancers? Was there any pattern to that? Yes. You probably wouldn't want to monitor mine. I'm not much of a tango dancer, that is for sure. It takes two to dance tango. I actually met my wife dancing tango. So I can... Oh, you did. And actually, as my friends were dancing tango, I couldn't help but think, okay, can we map their movement with computer vision? And can we look at the specific variation of dancers and see if they match the song? Do you see what I mean? Everything you're looking at, you're like, oh, there's an experiment. It must be impossible to walk through life without seeing these opportunities to learn something more in the way that you do and it's wonderful i i've got to talk about some some hopes for the future and we're already doing that i mean it first of all though thank you for sharing about what you went through and and i'm so sympathetic and and sorry that you you went through that that that's that's not a pleasant journey but um i'm also happy to to hear that it it perhaps crystallized a few things in your heart and mind and uh and i hope you're doing i hope you're doing okay i am doing very well actually i just had a successful ultrasound so i'm about to hit my five-year milestone which is a very big one and i think that yeah it's it for me during that time it came about have i been a good person overall have i apologized when i've done wrong am i doing overall a slight net positive that's why i say a grain of sand because we're all imperfect human beings trying to figure life out but contribute a little net positive there's a quote from you that i want to to read to end our conversation on because it really resonated with me you said to me there's no greater sin than losing a species without knowing that we lost it and the same can be said of soundscapes nature has been a source of infinite inspiration for every human culture art and science and documenting the rapid change of soundscapes and of species is imperative given the current biodiversity crisis yeah i think we're currently facing numerous challenges as in rapidly changing times that we find ourselves in and i think that often needs us to take a look in the mirror sometimes of ourselves and at the human footprint that we're living in the natural world and this footprint is not only visible on maps, but it's also available on listening to the soundscapes that we have. There's a lot of conversations often about animals being a symphony or an orchestra. I don't know if you've heard of Bernie Krause. Yes, I knew Bernie many years ago. Yes. Bernie has this incredible book called The Great Animal Orchestra. And I had the pleasure of talking with Bernie about this work early on, and he was very happy to see this and the educational component. I bet he was, yeah. I teasingly said, well, you know, nature sometimes is orchestra and symphonies, but to me it's also very jazzy sometimes. Like ecology is a lot of improvising. If the American Robin is here and the Predator is not there, you're going to improv. It's not always all synced. So it's a mixture of jazz and orchestra. I'm sure he agreed with you. Yeah. Oh, that's so great. He laughed. I don't know if he agreed or he left it, but he laughed. Right, right. Well, it makes sense to me. A combination of jazz and orchestral music. I mean, that's absolutely perfect. Like patterns, but also room for improv. Exactly. That's what ecology is all about. Dr. Diego Elizoto is the David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research affiliate at the California Academy of Sciences. Diego, thanks so much for sharing your passion with us. I've loved this conversation, and I'm already thinking about the next one. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to learn more about Diego's work, I highly recommend you watch a lecture he gave as part of Yale University's Frankie Program for Science and Humanity. There's a YouTube link in the show notes. Diego, before you go, I wanted to share one last thing with you just for some fun. I was always getting ready for our conversation and prepping for it and listening to your music and your work, I got inspired. And I'm a drummer. I like to play the drums, you know. I'm not the best drummer, but I love trying. And also, right now, I'm writing an episode about buffalo. So I tried to mimic a buffalo stampede on my drum kit a few days ago. I recorded it. No rehearsal, nothing flashy. I've got a speaker here. Can I play it for you? Yes, please. Can you hear it? The stomping, yeah. Well, I love the smile on your face. I love it. Thank you for showing me. This is awesome. I didn't know what you were going to show me, so this is great. And now I'm thinking about, yeah, like videos of tracks of the Serengeti wildebeest going up and down. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was so fun to just try it. And it was you that made me want to do it. I just wanted to sort of channel that sound and image. and I'd had the images in my head of these buffaloes writing this episode, but I thought, I wonder what that would sound like with the drum kit, but I'll keep on practicing. You have to add that too to this episode. I don't know about that. Thanks for listening to The Wild. If you like what you hear, share it. Tell a friend about the podcast or leave us a rating and review. It helps. And don't miss an episode. Subscribe. It's free and easy. and as always there are some great photographs and clips from our travels on instagram at chrismorgan wildlife the wild is a production of kuaw in seattle and chrismorgan wildlife with support from wildlife media matt martin produced this episode jim gates is our editor our theme music is by michael parker additional music from music bed and blue dot sessions the wild is hosted produced and written by me, Chris Morgan. A very special thank you for their kind financial support to Jill and Scott Walker, Rose Letwin, Ellen Ferguson, the Isdell family, Anna Kimball, Barbara Stallman, John Taylor, Paul Lister, Bob Yellowlees, and John and Julie Hanson. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourselves and nature so that nature can take care of you like she does every day. Seattle is a boomtown. 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