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Nathan Sherwood Liang, a musician and composer, incorporates the sounds of nature in his work to inspire listeners to better understand and appreciate the world around them.
Composer Nathan Sherwood Liang was just 15 when he knew he wanted to address climate change.
Growing up in San Francisco, he’d always been surrounded by nature — camping in the Redwoods, watching and re-watching David Attenborough documentaries, and taking a particularly memorable trip to Hawaii.
“Just seeing such a huge diversity of corals, hearing that sound that a coral reef has — those are very quintessential early childhood memories for me,” he says.
Around 10 years later, as a teenager, he returned to the same reef in Hawaii. But by then, the biodiversity had dramatically declined, and the soundscape had completely transformed.
“The shortness of that time felt so devastating to me,” Liang says. The experience made it clear to him that he wanted to work with the environment. He just wasn’t sure how.
In May of this year, Liang showed nature and music lovers in Santa Barbara how he’d answered that question through his artist residency with White Buffalo Land Trust. Founded in 2018, the nonprofit organization supports research and develops systems for regenerative agriculture and works to educate and shift public understanding through initiatives like its artist-in-residence program.
Liang spent the start of his six-week residency hiking across the land trust’s 1,000-acre Jalama Canyon Ranch in Santa Barbara County, observing, listening to, and taking field recordings of its different ecological zones: oak woodlands, grassland pastures, sage scrub, riparian areas, orchards, and a vineyard.
Wind rustling through branches, bugs jumping, or even the sound of him lightly touching one side of a tree, which could create vibrations across the entire web of branches: He recorded it all. Some trees even created their own distinct pitches, he says.
Liang also compressed years of soil temperature and moisture, tide, and solar radiation data into a range that humans can hear. “That is sort of the closest we could get to experiencing the vibrations of tides or solar radiation as the earth might experience them,” he says.
From there, he weaved together instrumentals and nature recordings, creating full compositions that reflect each of the ranch’s ecosystems and the feeling of being there.
The result was a three-hour performance with over an hour of music, accompanied by local flutist Jane Hahn and violinist Darrell Conrad. The performance took place in multiple places around the ranch, and the audience and musicians walked from one spot to the next. For a couple of the pieces, Liang also incorporated live elements, setting up a microphone in a river bed or in a wooded area. He then amplified and manipulated the sounds — “a direct way of turning the land into music,” he says.
Liang had long been inspired by dramatic film scores like Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer’s Pirates of the Caribbean and John Williams’s Jurassic Park. That cinematic style has influenced his music, he says.
At the same time, he grew up fascinated by environmental and climate sciences. By high school, he’d started to figure out how to fuse his two interests, when he incorporated a whale song into a composition for a marine ecology class.
“It was a very early step into thinking about the place of music in environmentalism, and also how to mix soundscapes and field recordings into music in a way that helps you connect with them or understand them in a different way,” he says.
While majoring in music at Williams College, Liang continued with geoscience classes, joining an oceanography professor (also a musician who played the bodhrán, an Irish frame drum) in Ireland for a research trip. He spent the summer studying the geomorphology (the study of landforms and the forces that shape them) of Irish boulder beaches while recording sounds and turning them into interactive instruments.
Another takeaway from the residency is just the importance of place — I think that’s been my life’s takeaway from the last 10 years. Just getting to know a place as well as you can is so important.
For his thesis, he traveled again, this time across Iceland, interviewing composers and recording sounds along the way, with the goal of synthesizing the role of environmentalism within composition.
“One of the questions I asked every composer that I talked to was, ‘Do you consider yourself an environmental activist?’ and almost all of them said no,” he says.
But he walked away with a few ideas about writing music influenced by the environment. One stemmed from his conversation with writer and filmmaker Andri Snær Magnason, who argues that words describing climate change lack cultural weight, due to how recent and fast-acting it is.
“Ocean acidification,” for example, does not have nearly the same emotional impact as the word “holocaust,” although it will in 200 years, Liang explains. Mythology is one way to create cultural weight, he says.
This became the foundation of his work with the White Buffalo Land Trust, whose artist-in-residence program aims to use art to forge connections with ecology and regenerative agriculture.
The name of his final performance at White Buffalo Land Trust, “In invitation, a gift,” even stemmed from one of White Buffalo’s success stories — its handling of mealybugs. Rather than using chemical pesticides to conquer the insects, which can cause mold and spread disease in vineyards, they installed a birdhouse to attract bluebirds that eat the mealybugs, resolving the problem almost immediately, Liang says.
“In the context of agriculture and climate change, you don’t hear that many stories about spontaneity, and such a quick response,” Liang says. “They extended an invitation to native species in that moment, and then it felt like in return, there was an invitation from the land that this process can work.”
Going forward, Liang hopes to make music that can bridge the gap between listeners and the land. As an example, he points to Roger Payne, whose 35-minute recording of a humpback whale song in 1970 helped propel a successful movement to ban commercial whaling.
He also references the work of bioacoustician Bernie Krause, who famously recorded a forest before and after selective logging. Visually, there was hardly any difference, but the soundscape had completely shifted, Liang explains.
“That’s just not something that people question or think about as much as they do what they see,” Liang says. “I want people to begin questioning that more.”
Since completing his residency in late May, Liang has returned to Northern California, and he hopes to continue building on his work from Santa Barbara. Specifically, he plans to explore the intersection of urban and environmental sounds in San Francisco.
“Another takeaway from the residency is just the importance of place — I think that’s been my life’s takeaway from the last 10 years,” he says. “Just getting to know a place as well as you can is so important.”
