Sea Lion Motion海狮

'Sea Lion Motion' was a part of 8³ New Music & Science Project, organized by the PRiSM
Manchester, UK, is a collaboration project between RNCM composers and Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) scientists. This piece has been performed by RNCM musicians in March 2018 and attracted interest and interviews from British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC North Wes), but was canceled due to bad weather.

The piece - 'Sea Lion Motion', was inspired by the research of Robyn Grant about the characteristics, behavior, and physiology of whisker touch systems in mammals. During my conversations with Robyn, I found out that sea lions might behave differently in response to different kinds of music - they may even dance! The research is by Peter Cook, Andrew Rouse, Margaret Wilson, and Colleen Reichmuth, who states that:

'...demonstrate that a less vocally flexible animal, a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), can learn to entrain head bobbing to an auditory rhythm meeting three criteria: a behavioral response that does not reproduce the stimulus; performance transfer to a range of novel tempos; and entrainment to complex, musical stimuli. '

Therefore, to test this, I first worked on the rhythmic elements in my piece, creating three different speeds so that we could see if the sea lion would bob her head in different ways. The final composition 'Sea Lion Motion' for oboe, violin, and percussion, is an artistically free response to the three rhythmically different areas in the sea lion study.