In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. That's the theme of our series “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”
Doug Harbin’s written lots of compelling music and he’s experimented with unusual sounds, including sounds from space. So when a scientist friend suggested he listen in on the noises of bees and butterflies for inspiration, the Moorhead composer couldn’t resist.
Eavesdropping into the insect world led him to write two compositions, “Wingbeat,” driven by the sounds of monarch butterflies, and “Drones,” a kind of symphony of bees. They’ll be performed in January at Concordia College in Moorhead.
The pieces start with simple natural sounds — a buzzing bee or a butterfly wing flap. Harbin manipulates those sounds electronically, so as the intensity builds the original sounds are unrecognizable.
"I've written pieces for orchestra or solo string instruments where the instruments imitated certain natural sounds but had never done anything like this," said Harbin as he sat in front of a large computer monitor flanked by speakers in his office at Concordia College, where he’s an associate professor of music theory and composition.
Harbin, 45, has an ongoing interest in electronic music. But using ambient recorded sounds in his compositions is a new endeavor. His first attempt was a couple of years ago when he was commissioned by a local gallery to produce a piece of multimedia music using sound and images of space from NASA.
His friend Courtney Grula attended the premiere. She’s a research scientist. They met playing kickball.
"And she said, ‘Hey, let's collaborate. I want to do something with bug sounds,’" Harbin recalled. "And I thought, that's a really brilliant idea."
He secured a grant from the Lake Region Arts Council, a Fergus Falls-based nonprofit, to buy some recording equipment and started collecting sounds.
Grula studies insects at the United States Department of Agriculture Biosciences Laboratory in Fargo, N.D. She helped Harbin record monarch wing beats and sound inside a bee hive.
Another friend, Brent Hulke, gave him access to a field where native bees were feasting on blooming sunflowers.
Harbin gathered "all sorts of really neat juicy sounds that I just couldn't wait to manipulate … I feel like a big kid. I get to just play with different sounds and there's no mistakes. There's no wrong answer.”
‘My heart skipped a beat’
A bigger challenge was getting sound from a monarch butterfly. Have you ever heard a monarch?
"Courtney held a monarch butterfly next to the microphone," said Harbin. "And it just flapped its wings and created this percussive rhythm."
"I was surprised that we got such a cool sound from the monarchs," said Grula.
"That was the sound that surprised me the most," added Harbin. "My heart skipped a beat — this is gold!"
He started listening to the recordings. There's a lot of variation in bee sounds. Harbin isolated several motives, or musical fragments. A succession of notes repeated throughout a piece is a common composer's technique.
"When I had these sounds, I would transpose them or reverse them," he explained. "And to me, that was very much like a motivic development."
He used a computer program to manipulate the sounds.
Grula specializes in insect cryopreservation, freezing germplasm from at-risk insects like monarch butterflies and some bumble bee species. It's similar to the technique for preserving human eggs or sperm for later use.
Grula has her name on scientific papers, but she says getting credit on a musical composition is "very cool."
"Being around insects all day you do hear a lot of different sounds and they are super interesting," she said. "So I thought it was a good way to bring attention to these at-risk species."
Grula said other USDA researchers are studying bee sounds as a possible tool for understanding how stressed the insects are.
For his part, Harbin doesn't compose with a message in mind, but he hopes work like this will help stretch how people define music.
"And I think one thing about Minnesota is just how blessed we are with all these natural sounds," he said. "I hope that it inspires deeper listening to all the natural sounds, and to also just have fun."
