A Study in Sound: Exploring the Sonic World at Whitman

Today’s sophisticated recording technologies can open up worlds of sound previously unavailable to human ears, preserve cultural histories that might otherwise be lost and give people new ways of interacting with the soundscapes of their daily lives. 

Across Whitman College’s campus, professors and students in diverse fields are exploring how experiences of sound transform our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Recording ‘Nuclear Dreams’

When he was about 10, Senior Lecturer of Music Michael Simon ’02 made his first recording, a saxophone concert for his grandmother, recorded on a cassette player tied with dental floss to the bottom of his music stand. 

“That’s when I realized that music can be portable and that a fixed thing can be a piece of art that might be different from the performance itself,” he says. 

In addition to playing bass and guitar in a popular Boston-based band, Simon has worked for almost two decades as a music producer and recording engineer. He brings all that practical experience to the newest track in Whitman’s Music program: Music Technology and Production.

“The idea of music production is akin to the idea of photography as a fine art,” Simon says. “It’s the idea that there is artistic intent in how you put together a recording. It’s not just the music that underlies it, but the actual sonics are a component of the art.”

Students who specialize in Music Technology and Production get hands-on experience with advanced recording and mixing techniques, synthesis, sampling and new music technologies—as well as the opportunity to work on sustained projects of personal interest. 

Simon, who grew up in Walla Walla without access to recording studios, became interested in artists who recorded in spaces that meant something to them—like Emmylou Harris, who recorded the album “Wrecking Ball” in a living room, or Willie Nelson, whose “Teatro” was recorded in an old movie theater.

“It’s the idea that the space itself might imbue the music with meaning that is extra-musical, and definitely informs both the meaning of the music and the literal production of the music, the sounds that are made,” he says.

Place is an integral part of Simon’s latest project, a new recording of the musical composition “Nuclear Dreams.” Composed by Reginald Unterseher with lyrics by Nancy Welliver, the piece is an oral history of the Hanford Site, where for more than 40 years, the U.S. produced plutonium for the nation’s defense program, including the fissile material for the first nuclear bomb.  

Simon originally recorded a 2019 concert of “Nuclear Dreams” for the Mid-Columbia Master Singers, who commissioned the piece. The recording was also filmed for the documentary “Richland.” Then, in fall 2024, the Department of Energy gave permission for a new recording inside the Hanford B reactor hall.

“I was really keen on using the recording as a way to hold the space as one of the actors in the piece,” Simon says. “The face of the reactor is full of protruding tubes, so it has a lot of surfaces that break up sound. To my mind, it sounds a lot like a cathedral, though not quite that long and a bit more metallic-feeling.”

While the reactor itself is now defunct, the other equipment in the hall is still quite noisy, something that Simon had to reckon with in the recording process. 

“In this case, I’m arguing for leaving the noise of the room in place, in part to hold the listener accountable for reckoning with what happened in this space—because it’s giant scientific progress, but at the same time, it’s impossible human and ecological devastation. And the piece deals with all of that, so I wanted the listener to be aware of the presence of the space’s physicality,” Simon says.

He anticipates that the recording of “Nuclear Dreams” will be released next year.

History-making music. Hear a clip of “Nuclear Dreams,” Movement 21 (“Spring of Paradise/Oppenheimer’s Gita”), recorded in the Hanford B reactor hall. Performed by Mid-Columbia Mastersingers, Justin Raffa (Artistic Director). Recorded, edited, mixed and mastered by Michael T. Simon. Music by Reginald Unterseher. Libretto by Nancy Welliver.

The Sound of Community

Sometimes collaborations are just meant to be. Camilo Lund-Montaño, Assistant Professor of History, and Mariana Ruiz-González, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, grew up in the same town near Mexico City. 

But the two first met at Whitman, where they began working together thanks to a Public Humanities Washington fellowship. Their joint project focuses on recording oral histories of Latinx groups in Walla Walla County.

Ruiz-González noticed when she first came to Walla Walla that even though the Latinx population is the second biggest group in number in the area, there was little Latinx influence to be seen in the town’s public art. Lund-Montaño and Ruiz-González traveled around the county to confirm that impression and began to suspect that the lack of Latinx representation in sculptures, murals and other visual art forms may be tied to a historic hostility toward the Latinx community—and a choice, conscious or not, to stay beneath the radar. 

“Even though there has been a presence of Latinos, of farmworkers, all the way back to the Bracero Program,” which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the U.S. in the mid-20th century, “there is that kind of defense mechanism of keeping a low profile,” says Lund-Montaño.

Recording oral histories of Latinx groups in the area became a means of understanding the lack of Latinx visual representation.

“Oral histories are a great way to access both historical memory and understandings of the present on a very individual level, because you’re getting deep into the mind of a specific individual who’s telling that story. And once you put together all these different stories, then you can begin to get the story of a community,” Lund-Montaño says.

As an entry point, Ruiz-González and Lund-Montaño focused their project on Latinx presence in local parades, which often feature groups like folclórico dancers and the Lowriders Club. They begin by asking each group if they’d be willing to participate in a group interview.

Lund-Montaño and Ruiz-González have found that the richness of the group dynamic reveals something difficult to capture in individual interviews: namely, the sound of a community.

Folclórico dancers describe the “family vibes” at practice. And Lowriders Club members talk about friendships that have become the “backbone” of their lives. 

“The way they’re visualizing themselves, it’s as a community or a group, not on an individual basis. So the narrative they construct together is about togetherness. With the oral history as a group interview, we don’t miss that part of the togetherness,” says Ruiz-González.

Tuning in to Life’s Soundscapes

Before she became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Whitman, Jordan Wirfs-Brock made a name with her award-winning work in “data sonification”—a way of engaging with data by interpreting it through sound. 

Wirfs-Brock, for instance, created an algorithmically composed piece of music to represent stock market volatility over a three-month period. By listening to data—instead of looking at it—data sonification invites people to engage with information in new ways.

Now she’s turning her attention to how people engage with the everyday sounds in their lives. 

“It used to be that sound was just something ephemeral. But with digital technology, we can capture it, remix it, make things with it, listen back to it, do all these things we couldn’t do before,” Wirfs-Brock says. “And we all have these powerful digital technologies in our pockets all the time that have the capabilities to do that, and yet they’re all so focused on video and visual media. They don’t really elevate sound and sonic ways of knowing.”

Last year, Wirfs-Brock received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study these questions about capturing and using everyday sounds. 

For the first stage of her project, she and her team of students interviewed members of the Whitman community who had recently experienced a major life event. Participants were asked to think about sounds that were meaningful to their lives, including those connected with specific people, like a distinctive sneeze; the sounds of places, like traffic noise or birdsong; and the sounds people make themselves. 

The interviewees then spent a week recording sounds with their phones—whatever they found meaningful. Afterward, they and the team listened to the recordings together, discussing what they captured and exploring the challenges and barriers to recording. “That was a big part of these post-interviews: asking whether there were sounds they wished they’d recorded and how the activity changed the way they thought about sound,” Wirfs-Brock says.

Now her team is using the data they’ve collected to create new technologies to help people connect with sound differently. One student, for instance, is working on a prototype of a device based on smart speakers that will allow users to retroactively record sounds that happened within the past 30 seconds. Future refinements to the device will incorporate a way to tag sounds so that users can recall later why they recorded a specific sound. 

For Wirfs-Brock, these technologies are ultimately aimed at helping people engage all their ways of perceiving the world.

“For me it really comes back to thinking about technology as a way that can help amplify and expose and help us examine our humanity, rather than flatten it,” she says. “I’m interested in technologies that can help us explore those dimensions of ourselves that we haven’t given as much attention to because we’re looking at a screen all the time.” 

Making a splash. Jordan Wirfs-Brock and her students are working on new ways to capture meaningful sounds from everyday life. Listen in as she and her 3-year-old daughter throw rocks in a pond.