Nature of Neptune

The Sea Organ of Zadar

The city planners of Zadar, Croatia have come up with a unique and harmonious way to meld their coastal city with the surrounding ocean.  Designed by architect Nicola Basic, the Sea Organ (Morske Orgulje) encloses 35 underwater pipes that resonate musically from the lapping of the waves.  The Sea Organ is located right along the water, underneath a series of long, elegant white stone steps where residents and tourists can sit and relax (photos by felber).

The Sea Organ is cleverly engineered to create musical notes from the motion of the ocean.  When you properly blow into a hollow cylinder, such as a flute, a didgeridoo, or an empty beer bottle, you are inducing the air inside to vibrate at the object's resonant frequency.  If it falls in the range of human hearing, this specific frequency is heard as a single musical note.  The pipes in the Sea Organ are designed to resonate when water rushes into them, causing the air to be pushed upwards through the tubes.  Ocean waves ebb and flow, making the pipes resonate frequently.

Listen to the Sea Organ

From a critical standpoint, why should ocean waves be turned into musical tones?  Is the sound of breaking waves not soothing enough?  Yet think about where ocean waves come from.  Waves themselves are created in the open ocean by steady gusts of wind.  The wind provides the driving force for water resonance in a very similar way that blowing across the opening of a flute provides the driving force for acoustic resonance.  Thus, in a way, the sounds of the Sea Organ represent the winds across the open ocean, brought to the coastline encoded in waves of water, where they are re-released inside the organ's pipes.  The organ draws attention to this environmental cycle.

The notes of the Sea Organ may be "played" randomly, but they are not arbitrary.  The 35 pipes are separated into seven sections of five, where each section forms a chord of a diatonic scale.  The five sections alternate two different but harmonious chords, G and C6.  According to a paper by the Acoustical Society of Croatia, this arrangement was chosen to reflect the four-voice male singing tradition of the region.

 

Both photos of the Sea Organ were taken by felber, and the sound clip and diagram are from Oddmusic.  Watch an interesting video about the organ from National Geographic, and you can even buy a 70 minute cd of Sea Organ sounds here.

Andy Goldsworthy and his use of time scale

Andy Goldsworthy was that kid who loved to play in streams and forests for hours and hours.  Lucky for us, the world-renowned British artist never grew out of it.

Much has been written about Goldsworthy's breathtaking nature-based sculptures and outdoor installations, but I would like to draw specific attention to the temporal aspects of his work.  I discussed the notion of "time scale" in artwork in reference to Arthur Ganson's sculptures, and Goldsworthy puts this concept to use better than anyone I have ever seen.  With his outdoor installations, Goldsworthy builds structures out of natural local materials and then gives them up to the environment.  This method allows him to explore the transience of both natural materials and environmental cycles at the same time.  The pieces are created specifically to "decay" in a way that will expose underlying features of the local environment.

The clip above, from the essential film documentary of Goldsworthy's work, Rivers and Tides, provides a perfect example of this transience.  Ever so slowly, the log structure he builds becomes surrounded and then lifted by the rising tide of the ocean.  The structure spins according to the water flow around it, and slowly loses its logs as it is carried out into open water. 

Everybody knows what tides are, and it is no mystery as to when they occur.  What Goldsworthy has done here is draw attention to the time scale it takes for the tide to act on the environment.  It is a slow, meditative pace, but steady and inevitable.  This piece, and others, make you aware of the intrinsic cycles in our environments, such as ebbs and flows, sunlight and darkness, freezing and melting, etc.  Many of these cycles occur in extremely quick or imperceptibly slow time scales, that we, as humans, rarely notice.  Goldsworthy brings them to our attention, subjectively.  Cycles between order and entropy, and life and death, are absolutely intrinsic not only to the environment, but to each of our lives.

The videos below show more film clips of his creations.  In his profound curiosity of the natural world, Goldsworthy speaks for both artists and scientists at the same time:

“You feel as if you’ve touched the heart of a place.  That’s a way of understanding; seeing something you never saw before, that was always there, but you were blind to it.”