Leah HennigThe Sound Studies Institute (SSI) at the University of Alberta held its first Sounds of Research competition.
The research competition is open to postdoctoral and graduate students in all disciplines and was juried by an interdisciplinary panel. This year was a pilot, which the director of SSI, Scott Smallwood, hopes will happen again next year.
Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell, dean of the college of natural and applied sciences, spoke at the celebration. She served as one of the jury members for the competition.
“This competition underscores the importance of listening to things that we otherwise wouldn’t hear about,” Kalcounis-Rueppell said.
She recounted a keynote speech by a NASA scientist Wanda Díaz-Merced that demonstrated the importance of sound studies.
Díaz-Merced went blind when she was working at NASA. She and her mentor found a way for her to continue her work despite not being able to see what was on the computer.
“She’s a pioneer of what is called sonification of research. What that does is it converts data across all different kinds of research disciplines into sound for people that don’t have sight,” Kalcounis-Rueppell said.
“This really matters and thinking about transforming research into sound actually means that down the road, someone might be able to participate in that work, who doesn’t have access to it in another form,” she said.
The music of the brain processing
Mitch Prostebby was awarded first place for “Thunderstorms and Symphonies of the Brain.” The audio piece consists of the sounds of unconscious brain activity of a rat.
The result is “music [that] yields important insight into how brain rhythms form harmonies and melodies which frequently cooperate across neural inputs to process internalized experiences.”
Prostebby narrates how he applied an algorithm that he developed at the U of A to this particular recording.
He told The Gateway that he had always been fascinated with the electrical activity of the brain and how the brain does representation and processing.
“We know it does this through electrical waves, so I dove into that,” he said.
His current research involves recording the electrical activity of animals under anesthetic and during sleep. The goal is to better understand how the electrical activity during sleep helps the brain decode memories.
“For this competition, I was sort of thinking, what if things play in waves for patterns all the time? And that those patterns are really essential for that storage of memory and those other functions,” Prostebby explained. “So I tried putting it into sound and into a music form, and it really popped out at me.”
He described the patterns of the sound as being musical in nature.
“There’s harmonies that change slowly, there’s melodies that go over top of it for higher frequencies,” he said. “They create this kind of repeating pattern that signals processing of memory related activity.”
Now, he hopes to go through further analysis to tease out the patterns and what those may indicate.
“This research is in early stages … [but] understanding the brain on this kind of level of patterns might help us detect when those patterns go awry and that could be helpful for all kinds of diseases, states, and mental health issues that we don’t have a firm grasp on yet.”
Other finalists
Second place was awarded to Matthew Weigel’s “‘You sound just like your dad.’” Weigel, a doctoral student in the English department, integrated archival recordings, poetry, and music into the recording.
“In this recording I illustrate sonically connections between place (Mackenzie River) and family. Sometimes these mappings are formal: oral tradition, interviews. And sometimes informal: family conversation, traveling together on the land,” his artist’s statement read.
Third place was awarded to Anna-Sofia Jylhae, a physics doctoral student, for “Gannon Storm (Remix).” The recording puts the magnetic disturbances of the Gannon storm, which hit Earth in May 2025, into a sonic form.
The research can be listened to online or in-person at the SSI.
