NJIT Professor David Rothenberg Presents New Book 'The Secret Sounds of Ponds'
David Rothenberg, distinguished professor of philosophy and music at New Jersey Institute of Technology, presented his new book “The Secret Sounds of Ponds”, a book, music and performance initiative.
Rothenberg started this project during the pandemic. When everybody was home, he decided to visit a nearby pond. After “tossing a microphone in,” he was able to capture an entirely new realm: the unexpected and stirring rhythms of some of the smallest and loudest creatures on Earth.
While working on his latest book, he contacted friends like Jérôme Sueur from the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris to get his opinion on the sounds he captured. Sueur told him that we only know 10% of the sounds in an average pond.
NJIT is a great place to do this. They always let us professors invent things.
“To learn that right around us, close by, are these amazing sounds and this kind of beautiful music and nature that people haven't really considered,” said Rothenberg. “It's easy to find. I often go do things that are hard to find like nightingales in Berlin, humpback whales in Hawaii, cicadas only once every 17 years, but these ponds are everywhere, and they just sound amazing. It's not that hard to take it in.”
Rothenberg describes his latest project as a puzzle for all the books he’s done so far about nature and sound. “We want to tell these stories, but the stories in a way can be best told in music,” he said.
The book is a combination of images, sonograms and carefully designed QR codes, which allow you to hold up your phone and play the sound that's being discussed in the reading.
Last fall Rothenberg gave a live presentation at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, right beside the pond where J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein had their famous conversation.
To complete “The Secret of Ponds”, Rothenberg invited Turkish poet and philosopher Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu to share her words and voice to the music in the book.
“It's extremely relevant as a project to our day because it encourages deep listening, and it encourages finding poetry in places where we don't expect them to exist,” said Akseloğlu. “Also I care about collaborations, when it comes to art making today, instead of imagining artists who are just kept narrowed down in one studio and just doing their own thing, it's a time for looking at the ecology of our relationships.
“And not only as an ecology in nature, but also the ecology of our relationships as creatives to approach things much more sensitively and get deeper into what nature really wants to say to us, to grow more sensitive about all these issues.”
Rothenberg plans to work on a film for this project. “We want to make a film. I'm going to be in Los Angeles during spring break, testing out how we might film some of this stuff, and what story can be made with my friend Lewis Rapkin.”
Rothenberg won a Grammy award in the category of Best Boxed Set
Also during the pandemic, he worked on a project called “For the Birds”, a 20-LP set produced by Randall Poster and The Birdsong Project.
Little did he expect that this year that project would win a Grammy award in the category of Best Boxed Set.
“I was amazed we were nominated," he said. "I'm happy to say that I'm a Grammy award-winning professor, but I wouldn't over push it.”
The track he created with Norwegian musician, Benedicte Maurseth, is called “Rørsenger”, a Norwegian word for the blyth's reed warbler.
