On My Music and Beyond: Transforming Underwater Sounds into Music
Sonification offers a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration between scientific research, artistic practice and environmental communication. This presentation explores sonification as a practice-based artistic research method through The Reef (2023), a composition for two pianos and live video based on underwater recordings from a coral reef ecosystem. Audio features extracted from the recordings were mapped onto musical parameters including pitch, rhythm and textural density, generating musical and visual structures from the sonic characteristics of the reef environment.
The presentation examines how environmental recordings are transformed through interacting technological, compositional and aesthetic decisions. Rather than treating sonification as an objective representation of environmental data, The Reef approaches it as a mediated and interpretive artistic practice situated between data, perception and creative organisation. It also considers the ecological dimension of the project, particularly coral reef vulnerability and marine pollution, proposing artistic sonification as both a compositional method and an environmentally engaged practice that can foster ecological awareness through multisensory experience.
Dr Maria Kallionpää
Maria Kallionpää is a Finnish composer, pianist, musicologist and artistic researcher based in Germany. She holds a DPhil in Music (Composition) from the University of Oxford and has worked internationally in higher music education, artistic research and contemporary music performance. Her practice explores non-linear musical forms, data sonification, AI, interactive and generative systems, and the social and ecological dimensions of music.
She is currently Research Associate at KreativInstitut.OWL, Hochschule für Musik Detmold, and Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Music and Sound. Her work has been presented internationally and has received numerous grants and awards, including the 2025 Data Sonification Award in the Climate Change category.
KreativInstitut.OWL, Detmold University of Music
Hans-Peter Gasselseder
Hans-Peter Gasselseder is an Austrian researcher, lecturer, composer and creative technologist working across cognitive psychology, sound, music, immersive media and human-computer interaction. He holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Salzburg and is pursuing a PhD in Media Informatics at Paderborn University, focusing on immersive experience and interactive audio. His research combines qualitative and quantitative methods with creative practice to explore perception, immersion, agency and experience in interactive media. He has taught and conducted research internationally and has published on sound experience, interactive music, VR and immersive media. He also founded SymphoniQ, developing software for music production, and collaborates regularly with Maria Kallionpää on artistic and research projects.
Paderborn University