I was pleased to write about composer Madli Marje Gildemann (b. 1994) as early as November 2024, during my research on Estonian women composers (1). Despite her young age, Gildemann already had an excellent idea to develop for music, deeply rooted in the exploration of the acoustic processes of matter and biological processes, a modus operandi transferred to scores, which thus became the result of a sonic transformation of scientific data or ecological observations.
In her compositions, Gildemann distils research begun at the Zurich University of the Arts, where she studied Acoustic Ecology: the composer initially focused on data sonification techniques, a research that found an elitist outlet when she wanted to give voice to airplanes and military vehicles in AH-64 APACHE; Then, the research shifted definitively toward natural and animal biology through data and perceptual realizations induced by field recordings, essentially a biological animism useful for capturing the hidden sounds of plant and animal life, a subject that has always fascinated humans due to the information it could yield. In Gildemann’s case, however, it wasn’t a matter of applying intuitive and decorative methods to music, but of considering patterns and tendencies in biological data that are
