Thundering Waves Companion Site

Below is the companion website for my Why We Get the Chills: Music Analysis Meets Cognition final project, a presentation and paper entitled "Thundering Waves: A Spectral, Cognitive, and Computational Complexity-Theoretic Analysis of John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean."

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The below word cloud features text I gathered by hand from composer John Luther Adams, performers Ludovic Morlot (conductor) and Laura Deluca (clarinetist), favorable critic Alex Ross, unfavorable critic Melinda Bargreen, and audiencemembers, including interviewees in a Seattle Symphony promotional video and one fellow Peabody student to whom I played three excerpts.

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The code for this visualizer was generated by Claude Opus 4.6 using structured, iterative prompting. Lemmata were grouped together, so for example "rumbling" and "rumble" were counted as one word. All text for this project, including the paper, presentation, and this text box, was written by me without AI assistance, except with read-only proofreading.

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The data (CSV) and script (PY) can be accessed here. Read the paper here and view the presentation video here.