Sound Explorations: Making scientific discovery accessible to ALL

Tybee Island Marine Science Center Podcast

Welcome to a world of music, science, imagination, wonder, and discovery. We are on location at Tybee Island Marine Science Center experiencing an AMAZING project called "Whales in Motion" with an organization called Sound Explorations. "Whales in Motion" is a musical and sculptural experience for the blind and low vision community.

Today, we have the pleasure of learning from our guest - Sound Explorations' Education Director Terry Wolkowicz - who has been designing innovative integrated arts educational curricula for more than two decades.

Sound Explorations' Artist, Emilie Grossman has created a series of 3-d sculpture models that illustrate the locomotion and foraging behavior of Humpback and North Atlantic Right whales based on actual whale tag data obtained by NOAA researchers in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and research from the 2018 paper, Foraging rates of ram‐filtering North Atlantic right whales authored by Julie Marie van der Hoop, Anna E. Nousek-McGregor, Douglas P. Nowacek, Susan E. Parks, Peter Tyack and Peter Teglberg Madsen.

Our visually-impaired participants today were able to run their hand across these sculpture models to perceive the whale foraging behaviors while a musician from the Savannah Philharmonic performs action-specific melodies that match the same contour and shape of the model. The musician watches closely to keep the musical contours at the same pace as the participant's hand. To say this is "moving" and "inspiring" to witness - would be an understatement. It's truly remarkable!

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