American Scientist

There are lots of ways to give a scientific talk, but this was the first one I'd seen with live accompaniment.

This idea—to create a soundtrack for a scientific talk—started with zoologist Roland Kays, head of the biodiversity research lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

"I knew Eban [Crawford] as a composer ... so we got together over coffee one day at the museum and cooked up this idea," says Kays. Crawford, who designs audio exhibits for the museum and runs Reaching for Lucidity Records, says his goal during the performance is to "draw people in—to get them involved emotionally with what [Kays] is saying ... and just make people pay attention more to him."

Kays's talk is about the eastern coyote, which is now spreading into North Carolina.

I experienced the fourth performance of their collaboration at the Research Triangle Park chapter meeting of Sigma Xi (which publishes American Scientist). During Kays's talk, Crawford stood at a table—DJ style—with several several electronic instruments, sometimes punching buttons for preprogrammed sound effects, pressing keys on a synthesizer, and all the while twisting dials to balance out the audio between Kays's voice and his soundtrack. That's because Kays's microphone was routed through Crawford's setup.

Because I separately captured audio from Kays directly, what you'll hear of Crawford's music in this podcast is what was captured by the lavalier microphone I'd asked Kays to wear. Still, listening to this podcast with headphones on, you can get a sense of the soundtrack behind Kays's voice—it is mostly what I would call ambient music—although there were several notable exceptions: Where the soundtrack highlighted inter-species sex and violence, that came through loud and clear.

Of course, a scientific talk about any charismatic megafauna—a large species with popular appeal—is almost assuredly a draw. So this event was certainly not a test of whether adding a live-performance soundtrack is a good science-communications strategy (and particularly not given our self-selected audience). But Kays is already thinking about his next such talk, and I hope others will try it too. Clearly this experiment will need plenty of replication studies, and I hope to be among audiences for such future experiments.