Gretchen Jude is a composer and sound artist from Salt Lake City, Utah. We spoke with her while she was in Tokyo, where she was on a fellowship, she has lived and worked in Japan many times over the years.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 17 of the River Lech, near Pitzling, a stretch that the scientists describe plainly: heavily modified, widely lacking natural geomorphic dynamics, not a candidate for restoration. Nothing special or remarkable. A section of river that, in the grand narrative of ecological recovery, barely registers.

But Gretchen listened to the field recording and heard something the data didn’t capture: a drone. A low, persistent hum emanating from the Wasserkraftwerk — the hydropower station — that underlies the rush of water like a hidden ground note. She began to sing along with it, matching her voice to its frequencies, until she found what was there: a D-flat major triad, buried in the industrial hum of a machine converting river into electricity.

That discovery changed everything about the piece. Rather than mourning what the river had lost, Gretchen imagined something stranger and more hopeful — a remystification. What if the goal wasn’t to restore the river to a pre-human state, but to restore our sense of wonder about it in whatever state it is in?

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).

Louis Möckel is a musician and researcher based in Halle, Germany. His practice sits at the intersection of experimental music, sound art, and acoustic ecology — a discipline that studies ecosystems not through what can be seen, but through what can be heard.

Elissa Goodrich is a composer, vibraphonist, and sound artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Trained as a classical percussionist, she has spent years working at the intersection of contemporary music and cross-disciplinary collaboration, including ongoing work with climate scientists and fluid dynamics engineers, turning environmental data into sound and music.

Julian Goldberger is a musician and artist based in Los Angeles, recording and performing under the name Eulipion Corps.

We reached out to him asking a few questions about the work he did for our Art & Science project, Flow

Anja Kreysing is a musician and researcher based in Münster, Germany. Her work moves between experimental music, sound art, and acoustic ecology, with a particular interest in how constructed and natural environments shape each other through sound.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 19 of the River Lech — a channelised, heavily regulated stretch near Sheuring, where dams and reservoirs for hydropower production have left the river, in the scientists’ words, “widely lacking natural geomorphic dynamics.” There are no restoration plans for this segment.

In today’s episode we’re speaking with Salma Ahmad Caller, a UK-based multidisciplinary artist with a strong connection to rivers — the Thames and the Nile.

Salma worked on Segment 15 of the river Lech — a stretch that, on the surface, has all the appearance of a secret, undisturbed place. You can hear the swans flying. A lone man unmooring his boat. And yet, just upstream, turbines roar. That contrast — between the dream of serenity and the reality of a world in crisis — became the heart of her composition.

Sergio's approach is rooted in his double life as developer and composer. He wrote computer vision code to extract the exact shape of the river from a satellite image, then simulated 300 stone trajectories along the current turning their coordinates into pitches, and those pitches into a long, quietly shifting composition for synthetic strings. The river didn't inspire the music. It generated it.

In today’s episode we’re going to Rovigo, in the Veneto region of northern Italy, to meet Francesco Ganassin — teacher, musician, and builder of instruments that think for themselves.

Francesco works on Segment 8 of the river Lech, a threshold zone where the mountains begin to yield to the plains, and where part of the river is diverted into a side channel for hydropower. It is a landscape of transitions — and transition is very much Francesco’s territory.