Tomorrow, a group of international researchers in Earth sciences, gathered for a week in Foix, offers the general public the opportunity to learn about their disciplines in music.
The role of molten volcanic rocks in the formation of the primitive earth, and their current role: this is the subject addressed this Tuesday morning by Charles Le Losq, volcanologist at the Institute of Physics of the Globe of Paris, in the amphitheater of the center University of Foix. In English, in front of an audience of researchers and students, the conference is rather reserved for initiates.
This group of around thirty scientists, gathered in the Comtale City by the seismologist Nobuaki Fuji. They are geologists, geodynamicists, seismologists, volcanologists, from France, Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom and even Germany. The goal ? “Being all together in one place to talk to each other.”
Each morning, its conference. Then, in the afternoon, researchers and students mingle to think about problems together. “It’s a bit like the model of hackathons, in computer science, but less intense, over a longer period,” describe the scientists present on Tuesday.
But the organizer of the event wanted to share it with the general public. For this, he imagined a time of popularization of musical science. Himself a musician – he plays the bassoon, including in local groups – he is working during this week to collect videos, which will be shown in the public garden of the Passéjade, while musicians will play the soundtrack, ” sometimes improvising, sometimes not “.
These videos will be provided by the scientists participating in the event. Milena Marjanovic, marine geophysicist, will share, for example, filmed extracts from her scientific expeditions at sea, “to publicize the life of a researcher in this field,” she explains. These images will be accompanied by a dozen local musicians, led by Mikael Celma, director of the Foix music school. Nobuaki Fuji will present images of the propagation of seismic waves in the earth, to music he himself composed from recordings of seismic signals.
For him, this formula avoids a pitfall: that of a popularization event that “looks like a church mass. Popularization is a difficult exercise, sometimes a little exhausting for the public. There, we propose them full of beautiful images with music. If at the end they can retain some scientific information, so much the better “. “The goal is to arouse their curiosity”, concludes Cécile Prigent, researcher in marine geosciences.
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