Flowcast | A Music & Science podcast

50 international artists. One river. Urgent questions.

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Flowcast is the podcast companion to Flow, an art & science project where 50 international musicians compose original pieces inspired by the ecology, history, and restoration of the river Lech. Each episode, we chat with one of the artists about their creative process — then we listen. artmusicscience.substack.com

1d ago

Anna Vienna Ho - 生生不息 (Circle of Life)

In today’s episode we’ll listen to Anna Vienna Ho’s composition. For Flow, she worked on Segment 21 of the River Lech — the Stadtwald Augsburg, a vast urban forest south of the city, where calm canal waters wind through parkland and families spend their Sunday afternoons. A landscape that is at once carefully managed and quietly alive. We’ve reached out to her, asking more about the philosophy and the process behind her work. Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe
5d ago · Bonus

When Data Learns to Sing: Inside Karhide's Sonification Tools

Have you ever wondered what a wildfire pattern sounds like? Or have you ever wished for an ambient drone to accompany a text you wrote? Good news, now you have some intuitive, interactive online tools to do exactly that. Tim Waterfield is the man behind the Karhide project who, together with Rafael Diogo’s Deep Dive Sound, created Lo-fi River Flow for our project. On top of making music he’s always very busy creating ways to make music technology more accessible and easier to use. I spoke with him recently about some of the free tools he created. Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe
Oct 7

Giuseppe Cordaro - Braided Memory (Lech)

Giuseppe Cordaro is a sound sculptor and field recordist based in Reggio Emilia, Italy. His practice sits between attentive documentary listening and abstraction — drawn to places where sound behaves like matter, where a landscape can be heard as a living score, and where a recording becomes not an illustration of a site but its afterimage. Giuseppe treated the field recording as his entire palette — foreground, environment, and instrument simultaneously. His composition is called Braided Memory (Lech). We’ve reached out to him to know more about the process behind his composition. You can read the interview here below and listen to his music in the podcast episode. "I approached the River Lech as a memory machine: wide air and landscape, close water detail, and the river’s vibrations. These hidden resonances became the harmonic spine of the piece. The composition stays faithful to the original source while drifting into abstraction: selective time-stretching and spectral sculpting reveal submerged textures; granulation turns droplets and foam into a fine acoustic dust; site-shaped reverberation merges perspectives into one blurred, dreamlike space. What begins as a recognisable current slowly becomes a palimpsest: the river as presence, then as afterimage." - Giuseppe Cordaro Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe
Sep 30

Heather Spence - Left and Right of Passage / Out of the Woods

Heather Spence is a marine biologist, musician, and composer based in Washington, DC, who spends much of her research life recording and interpreting underwater soundscapes, work with dolphins and coral reefs among it. Her music draws directly from that world, built around natural sound and what she describes as a celebration of listening to the natural world and finding our place in it. For Flow, that practice found an unexpected match: a river, rather than an ocean, still asking the same questions about water and what moves beneath its surface. Heather is something of a special case in this project. Rather than one segment, she ended up working on two, and the two pieces she made couldn’t sound more different from each other. Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe
Sep 23

TYΦA - Litzau Loops

TYΦA are Laura Jean Cameron and Matt Rogalsky, a duo based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Laura Jean is a sonic geographer and professor at Queen’s University; Matt is a composer and sound artist who leads the Sonic Arts Studio at the same institution. Their practice begins with cattails — the marsh plant whose scientific name, Typha, gives the duo its name — hand-woven into cordage strings that are plucked, bowed, and made audible through contact microphones. For Flow, they worked on Segment 14 of the River Lech — the Litzauer Schleife, one of the very few remaining stretches of the German Lech that approximates a natural riverscape, and one whose protection carries a history considerably more complicated than it first appears. Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe
Sep 16

Canis Arboris - Tukan

Paweł is a musician and sound artist based in Southampton, UK, who records and performs under the name Canis Arboris. His practice moves between electro-acoustic composition, field recording, and a quiet attentiveness to the way places, objects, and time leave traces in sound. For Flow, he worked on Segment 11 of the River Lech — the stretch passing through Füssen, where the river crosses from Austria into Germany and leaves the mountains behind. Füssen is known to most visitors for Neuschwanstein castle, visible on the hillside above the town. What fewer people know is that it is also home to a centuries-old tradition of violin making — the Geigenbauer, craftsmen who have been shaping wood into instruments in this town since the Renaissance, when Füssen was one of the most important centres of lutherie in Europe. But Paweł’s connection to this segment of the river predates the project entirely. In our short interview, followed by his music, he will explain how, and why his piece is called Tukan. Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe
Sep 9

Daina Dieva - Rupuma - D

In this episode we’re talking with Daina Dieva, an artist and anthropologist working between sound, video, performance, and ethnographic fieldwork. Her PhD research, conducted at the University of Tartu, took her to the Roya Valley, on the French-Italian border, in the aftermath of Storm Alex, the storm that tore through the region in 2020. She arrived the following summer, when the debris had mostly been cleared but the damage, in every other sense, was still unfolding. She had planned to keep her two practices apart. Anthropology on one side, art on the other, a boundary meant to give her somewhere safe to retreat to in an overwhelming field, but it didn’t hold. Over months of fieldwork in a landscape still absorbing the shock of the storm, her artistic practice stopped being a refuge from the research and became a way of doing it. Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe
Sep 2

Michael Northam - AUFPASSEN!

Michael Northam is an American sound artist based in Chino Valley, Arizona, who has been exploring sound-as-art across more than 30 countries for the past 30 years. He describes his practice as “composting sounds” — re-framing surroundings through a combination of natural sound phenomena, synthesis, and found objects to create location-based work that slows down time and listens deeper to what he calls the mysterious otherness lurking under our collective noses. His website is Orogenetics, a word that combines orogeny, the geological process of mountain formation, with genetics: the study of how things inherit what came before them. For Flow, he worked on Segment 10 of the River Lech — the Lech Falls near Füssen, where the river passes through a gorge on the border between Austria and Germany. What he received was a field recording that contained almost nothing he expected. No water. Only footsteps, handling noise, distant vehicles, a fragment of a human voice. A recording so shaped by human presence that the river itself had disappeared from it entirely. Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany). Get full access to Art Music Science at artmusicscience.substack.com/subscribe

Flowcast is the podcast companion to Flow, an art & science project where 50 international musicians compose original pieces inspired by the ecology, history, and restoration of the river Lech. Each episode, we chat with one of the artists about their creative process — then we listen. artmusicscience.substack.com

Creator

50 international artists. One river. Urgent questions.
Years Active

2026
Episodes

42
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Riccardo
Show Website

Flowcast | A Music & Science podcast