What can music teach us that science can’t? - MAX COOPER - Musician, Fmr. Computational Biologist

Interviewed by Mia Funk

How is being an artist different than a machine that is programmed to perform a set of actions? How can we stop thinking about artworks as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences? In this conversation with Max Cooper, we discuss the beauty and chaos of nature and the exploration of technology music and consciousness.

Max Cooper is a musician with a PhD in computational biology. He integrates electronic music with immersive video projections inspired by scientific exploration. His latest project, 'Seme,' commissioned by the Salzburg Easter Festival, merges Italian musical heritage with contemporary techniques, was also performed at the Barbican in London. He supplied music for a video narrated by Greta Thunberg and Pope Francis for COP26. In 2016, Cooper founded Mesh, a platform to explore the intersection of music, science and art. His Observatory art-house installation is on display at Kings Cross until May 1st.

Photo credit: Alex Kozobolis

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about Seme and how it originated.

MAX COOPER

That was a commission from Salzburg, a classical and opera music festival, a very well renowned one. Each year they have some sort of electronic related project amongst this non electronic program, so they asked if I could do that. They said that their program this year was around Italy, so Italian opera, Italian classical music.

Palestrina choral music was one of the main interesting and beautiful discoveries for me. I was delving into a lot of historic Italian music, and a lot of it just didn't really lend itself to what I'm interested in musically. A lot of it was commissioned by very grand people for very grand places to sound very grand, and that didn't really resonate with me. But when I went to Palestrina, it was music from the 1500s that was written for worship, church music. With the help of Niels Orens, Tom Hodge, Kim Sheehan, and Sarah Aristidou, I was able to take these original scores from Palestrina, and more or less keep the music as it was, although there was one of the pieces that we modulated a little bit into a slightly more modern scale. We slowed them both down as well to give each harmony more breathing space. Sarah and Kim sang the vocal layers, I played synth layers, and Tom played piano. It was a musical discovery I wouldn't have come across if I hadn't had that unusual brief of trying to make a project around Italy.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about some of your earliest musical memories and your journey towards music.

COOPER

Music was always there as I was growing up. My mum was a music teacher, my dad was an engineer, so there was always music and science around me, but I didn't really engage with music seriously until I found electronic music. Something about the purity and the simplicity of it really grabbed me, and then I got into the whole club scene and started DJing and all that. I came to music in a serious way much later than I'd come to the sciences, for example. I'd always been studying sciences and progressing that career well ahead of my wanting to delve into music, but music was always there and it always connected with me emotionally. I found at some point that if I sat down and tried to render how I felt musically, it led to interesting results, and music people enjoyed, so I kept pursuing that and then linking in my scientific interests. I didn't want to only do music, I didn't want to only do science, so it was: How can I tie all these interests together? I started experimenting with commissioning visual artists to make science related work, collaborating with people interested in the same sorts of things, and then building a system for playing visuals and the music in live contexts. And I just followed that path down to where I am now.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

For a work in progress expanding upon ideas in your 2022 album Unspoken Words, you’ve been asking people: I want to know how you feel and what it's like to exist inside your mind. What would you like to say that you cannot say in everyday life?

MAX COOPER

I can describe things technically; as a scientist, we have language to describe. You could say the neural correlates of consciousness, right? You could describe what they are and how the brain functions and behaves in an objective manner. But that really doesn't seem to get anywhere near the question of what it's actually like to be a human. Music, essentially, for me is: I can sit down, and I can make a chord progression, and make a musical structure that resonates with how I feel at that moment and seems to capture things which go beyond anything I can put into words. That was the idea of the Unspoken Words project: To try and capture those things and then interpret them with visual artists. For me, that's as close as I can get to describe what it's like being me. So I'd say you just have to listen to the music, and then you'll hear what it's like, I suppose.

Harnessing Historic Architecture in Audiovisual Art

I love working with historic sites. I've done a few events and installations working in old cathedrals; we did one with And& Festival in Leuven, and in Carlisle Church in Belfast with the AVA Festival guys, and the Acropolis of Athens, and lots of other venues. I love venues where I can turn up and map projections onto architecture. Particularly when you're using old historic buildings, they're full of feelings and ideas before you, you know, from the history and what you associate them with. That embeds itself into the music and the visuals that you're presenting, so you get this extra layer of engagement and emotion and ideas coming through, which I love. I generally use projectors rather than screens for that reason, so that I can use the architecture and try to make the show itself interact with it. Whenever I can, I try to project. It adds to the storytelling, I think, and it makes it feel more special. We're all used to going to clubs and festivals, you know, the big black box of the club and there's a sound system and there's a screen—we're all used to that. But when you go somewhere with crazy historic architecture and you're having a party inside that space and there's all these moving things, there’s the extra magic.

The Artistry of Nature

I find the most beautiful projects are the ones where I can map a natural system explicitly. A lot of my projects—if I'm approaching some sort of very human idea, for example, like I did with Unspoken Words—have to be quite interpretive. But I love when I'm working with a natural system which is really boiled down to something. The Fibonacci sequence is an example of that, or the distribution of the primes, or the digits of pi in a treemap, or waves or symmetry. There are these ideas which are really foundational to science and nature which are boiled down to simple quantitative systems. I find that whenever I do a project representing something like this with a visual artist, instead of seeing the artistry of the artist, or my idea, what we see is the artistry of nature. And the artistry of nature is always richer than the artistry of a human, in my opinion.

The Importance of the Arts

The sciences don't teach us everything, and we're moving as science and technology become ever more dominant. The arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch with the things that the sciences can't tackle: What it's actually like to be a person, what's actually important, what we know. We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine, for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness according to some sort of metric, or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. I think what's really important is exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, and being open minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other. The arts are an essential part of that.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Lyle Hutchins. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Associate Text Editor was Sofia Reecer. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Interviews - FEATURED

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Conversation with Showrunner · Creator · Head Writer
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Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist · NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
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Vice President · Head of the Paris Office
UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

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Award-winning Climate Activist
Author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future

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INGRID NEWKIRK

Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

I think things do change because of agitation. So agitation is vital. I mean, nobody who is in a cause should be there to win a popularity contest, whether you're working for children or the elderly or working for peace animals, it's all against nonviolence, aggression, domination, and needless cruelty and suffering. It's all for respect. So you have to be vigorous. You have to use your voice. You can use it politely, but if people don't listen, at PETA, we escalate. So we always start off with a polite letter, a polite entreaty. We always try to, as I say, do the homework. So we have the options that we put out on the table to say, look, instead of doing this, you could do that, and we will help you transition to that.

DANIEL GOLEMAN

Psychologist
Author of Emotional Intelligence · Optimal · Ecological Intelligence

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DUSTIN O'HALLORAN

Emmy Award-winning · Oscar-nominated Composer · Musician
1 0 0 1 · Silfur · Transparent · Lion

The album 1 0 0 1 is really like a journey from our connection with nature to where we are now, in this moment where we're playing with technology. We're almost in this hybrid space, not fully understanding where it's going. And it's very deep in our subconscious and probably much greater than we realize. And it sort of ends in this space where the consciousness of what we're creating, it's going to be very separate from us. And I believe that's kind of where it's heading – the idea of losing humanity, losing touch with nature and becoming outside of something that we have created.

JEFFREY ROSEN

President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment.

BERTRAND PICCARD

Explorer & Aviator of the First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder of Solar Impulse Foundation & Climate Impulse

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ED ZWICK

Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer
Glory · The Last Samurai · Shakespeare in Love · Thirtysomething
Author of NYTimes Bestseller Hits, Flops & Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood

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ALAN POUL

Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Executive Producer · Director
Tokyo Vice · Six Feet Under · Tales of the City · My So-Called Life

I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from.

Featured

ANGANA CHATTERJI · SIDDHARTHA DEB

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MICHAEL CRONIN

Author of Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene
Snr. Researcher · Trinity Centre for Literary & Cultural Translation

The idea of a kind of inert world that is simply there for our pleasure, enjoyment, and exploitation has proved to be catastrophically mistaken because we see it with flooding, we see it with forest fires. We see it with acidification of the oceans. We see it with the continuing rise in temperatures that the world itself, the more-than-human world is fighting back. It has taken on its own agency. And therefore, the idea of a pyramid, a hierarchy, is no longer operative.

CAMILLA HAWTHORNE

Co-Editor of The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity
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A Black geographic perspective for me was really helpful in trying to clarify how we can simultaneously understand Blackness as a global project, that is anti-national, that transcends borders, but that also takes on really specific meanings and practices in different places, engagements with Black geographies that are looking just beyond the framework of North America.

ITA O'BRIEN

Intimacy Coordinator · Founder of Intimacy on Set
Author of Intimacy On Set Guidelines

For years, people spoke about how awkward or embarrassing it was to perform the intimate content. And what they're speaking about is feeling horrible. If something's awkward, that squirm, that ring in the body, it feels embarrassing. That's actually an emotion that is not professional. That is not allowing the actor to stay feeling listened to, heard, empowered, autonomous. And so that they can just get on without any of those concerns and do their job to their best ability. And that's the awareness that we brought. So, we're saying, it is not suitable in our workplace for anybody to feel harassed or abused.

SY MONTGOMERY & MATT PATTERSON

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ANDRE DUBUS III

NYTimes Bestselling Author
House of Sand and Fog · The Garden of Last Days · Ghost Dogs · Townie

All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. Writing is a free fall into the writer's psyche, and if you want some clarity on what you believe, just write something sincere and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, what you think, what you fear, regret, and desire, etc.

LUDOVIC SLIMAK

Paleoanthropologist · Author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature

This book is not just about Neanderthals. It's a book about us. I wanted to warn humans, to say there is something in us that is so efficient and dangerous. We've effectively collapsed many things and are now inducing the collapse of natural environments on the planet. And after that, we might even cause the collapse of ourselves as Homo sapiens.

PAOLA SPINOZZI

Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing · University of Ferrara
Co-editor of Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies

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Comics, Music, Ethics & AI

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Climate Change, Education, Mental Health & Advocacy for Nature

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Songs of Nature

Musicians, Writers, Ecologists & Philosophers on the Mysteries of the Natural World

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TARA ISABELLA BURTON

Author of Here in Avalon · Social Creature · Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
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BRYCE COON

Director of Education · EarthDay.ORG

If you talk to a young person about the climate crisis, they tend to have one of two responses. They either feel like we're not doing enough, and they're advocating for more. The other response is that students would just shut down and wouldn't want to talk about it. I believe introducing climate education is key to addressing that climate anxiety and providing students with climate optimism, hope and solutions.

KATHLEEN ROGERS

President of EarthDay.ORG

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The Unseen Invasion of Microplastics in Our Lives

Interview with KATHLEEN ROGERS
President of EarthDay·org

Microplastics and nanoplastic pollution are currently blanketing the planet. They are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, infiltrating our bodies and even brains and human embryos. Coca-Cola alone sells 100 billion+ single-use plastic bottles each year, ending up in landfills and the ocean. Earth’s population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2050. Two-thirds of humans will become city dwellers. Our waste will drive a mounting worldwide crisis.

POORVA JOSHIPURA

PETA U.K. · Senior Vice President
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LEWIS DARTNELL

Astrobiologist · Science Communicator
Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us · Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

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SASHA LUCCIONI

Founding Member of Climate Change AI
AI Researcher & Climate Lead · Hugging Face

My work is really about figuring out how, right now, AI is using resources like energy and emitting greenhouse gases and how it's using our data without our consent. I feel that if we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable, we can help future generations so that AI will be less of a risk to society. The way I got into this field was working on the environmentally beneficial applications of AI, and I do believe that that's an impactful way of using AI techniques because there's so much data about the climate, satellite data, and sensor data, and the way to go about this is to work with domain experts. AI is never going to solve the problem on its own, but it can be a tool. So I think that there's a lot of promise there.

DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR

Fmr. European Chair for Sustainable Development & Climate Transition · Sciences Po
Development Clinician focused on Cities & Nation States

How do you have economic growth that is socially equitable and environmentally sustainable? It's not just that you have ecological sustainability; hence, that is sustainable development. Because lots of examples of economic, ecological, and ecologically sensitive growth need not be socially equitable. That's why this whole emphasis on just transition is not just about climate, but it's also about justice. It's about social equity in economic growth. Unlike in Europe, where there is now the call for degrowth or a circular economy, most parts of the world would look at you blankly if you talked about degrowth because they are hungry for growth. And so sustainable development is about managing these trade-offs.

From Ancient Wisdom to the Language of the Earth

Scientists, Artists, Psychologists & Spiritual Leaders Share their Stories and insights on the importance of connecting with nature, preserving the environment, embracing diversity, and finding harmony in the world.

JAY JORDAN & ISABELLE FRÉMEAUX

Artists, Activists & Anarchists Seize Wetlands from the French Republic
Authors of We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones
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DOUG LARSON

Award-winning Scientist · Ecologist · Professor Emeritus · University of Guelph
Author of Cliff Ecology · The Urban Cliff Revolution · The Dogma At My Homework

I think one thing I learned from looking at the ancient trees is that there is no great benefit to anything of growing quickly and accumulating vast resources. Growing slowly and patiently and with fewer demands on the environment in which you live is just as healthy and perhaps more healthy than the endless hunger for more and more and more, which we see as a characteristic of our species.

THOMAS CROWTHER

Ecologist · Founder of Restor
Co-chair of the Board for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives.

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PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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