Finale ….

The exciting finale program at the State Theater was divided into two parts. The first part began with almost a dozen musicians on stage (flutes, clarinets, strings, piano) imitating the natural birdcalls that formed the background sounds to their performance.

After this introduction to the intersection of animal sounds and music, two Cornell science professors took over the show. Ron Hoy, a biologist and animal communication specialist, and John Greenly (who described himself as a “clarinetist by night, physicist and birder by day”) traded off, both telling stories and explaining the science behind bird calls, insect sounds, and a number of other natural phenomena. Their explanations were accompanied by beautiful nature photos projected on a large screen, including a fascinating audio-visual presentation on the “natural calendar” of bird and animal sounds throughout the different seasons of the year. A quartet of musicians (including Greenly himself on clarinet) remained on stage to intersperse music into the presentation, including several movements of a piece by Messiaen, a French composer who drew heavily on bird songs in his music.

After this beautiful presentation on the ways music and melody can be used for communication in the natural world, the second half of the show featured Gary Rydstrom, an Oscar-winning sound designer who has worked on a number of films. He told us about his work of imagining and creating dinosaur sounds for the two Jurassic Park films. As he pointed out, no one will ever know what a dinosaur sounds like, so it was up to him to be creative!

First, Rydstrom played a series of raw sound recordings he had made — everything from a baby elephant to a walrus to a debarked dog to an “angry goose” to trees falling to a squeaky tape dispenser — and then proceeded to show us the fine art of transforming and layering these sounds to create a complex new sound that might become T. Rex’s footsteps, or a velocaraptor’s breathing. He revealed some secrets, like the fact that one single recording of a baby elephant’s screeching was responsible for the high-pitched part T. Rex’s fearsome roar every single time it appeared in the film (because the uncooperative baby elephant had only made one sound, despite days and days spent at the zoo waiting for him to make the noise again!). He also revealed the ways in which inanimate objects can make great animal noises in film, and vice versa. For instance, did you know that Godzilla’s roar (in the old Godzilla films) was made by scraping a bow up and down a cello’s strings below the bridge?
Throughout his explanations, Rydstrom played a huge variety of sound clips, and had the audience continually in stitches with his hilarious stories about how the sound clips had been gathered. He concluded with a montage of clips from the two Jurassic Park films centering around all of the dinosaurs and the sounds they made. For those of us who saw and heard Rydstrom’s presentation, watching Jurassic Park — or, for that matter, any movie with animal sound effects — will certainly never be the same again!

. . . Well, this is it, the end of another Light in Winter! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my blog entries, and that I’ve perhaps been able to give you a little flavor of the festival. It’s always exciting to be able to tell my friends that I learned about wine tasting, quantum mechanics, modern art, and movie sound effects — all in the same weekend! Light in Winter is the perfect place to make all of these diverse connections, and that’s why I look forward to coming back to it again and again.

Photos: The performers from the first half of “The Birds that Roared” finale; Gary Rydstrom, the presenter in the second half of the finale; Rydstrom points to a scene from the film “Jurassic Park”

Categorized: General