Flagellate: playing with algae

Application summary

This project brings together art and science in musical performances featuring microscopy of aquatic plankton samples, traditional shepherd’s horn and flute instruments, and horns made from kelp algae. We take as our starting point the homonyms "flagellate" (a cell with one or more flagella(e)) and "flageolet" (a musical phenomenon found in the harmonic series, which gives all pitched sounds their characteristic tone and timbre), which serve as an inspiring starting point to stimulate dialogue between science and art and highlight poorly appreciated topics from each discipline: algae and their importance in aquatic environments, and traditional Finnish-Karelian shepherd instruments. We emphasize how each have their own important niches: in marine ecosystems, and music and cultural heritage. As a diverse working group of musicians exploring Nordic shepherds instruments and horns made of kelp algae, one marine biologist, and the Finnish aquatic environments themselves, we are designing a set of concerts in locations along the Finnish Baltic Sea coast and Lake Saimaa. We will perform a horn fanfare at a local water body, while collecting a sample together with the community using a plankton net. This sample will be microscoped and projected in concerts intertwining traditional shepherd’s instruments, kelp horns and our musical encounters with the projected plankton sample. Each concert will be followed by a short multilingual lecture introducing the aquatic microbes and the instruments. Concert audio recordings combined with microscope videos from each sampling site will be shared online, showcasing both the music and local plankton diversity. After the project period, we hope to extend this collaboration to visit more locations in Finland, the Baltic, and beyond, to connect as many communities as possible with their musical traditions and microscopic aquatic neighbours, thereby helping to inspire their preservation.