Latest news with #EllieWilson
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Push to halt fall in young people in marine sector
A course is being launched in Guernsey over concerns about the general decline of young people entering the maritime industry. The island has a rich maritime history and 98% of freight that comes in into the island arrives through St Peter Port and St Sampson Harbour. Assistant harbour master Kieran Higgs said the aim was to invest in the future by supporting younger people in the island to pursue the industry as a career. The new apprenticeship course could be ready this September and it was hoped this will lead to full time jobs in the sector, course leaders said. After studying marine biology at Anglia Ruskin University, Ellie Wilson began her career at Sea Fisheries, where she works as a commercial boatman. She said: "A couple of years ago I was looking into getting some qualifications and to do your practical - even just your day skipper - is not something you can do over here. You have to either go to Jersey or abroad to somewhere else. "So I found that really difficult and the way I have got into everything is more just from stepping stones of starting one thing and then going into something else." She said she planned to leave in September to go to the Isle of Wight to study a superyacht cadetship at UKSA. Upon completion of the course, she will become a qualified officer of the watch, which means she can be an officer of the watch on boats under 3,000 tonnes. More news stories for Guernsey Listen to the latest news for Guernsey Mr Higgs said: "I think there is generally a decline in British seafarers globally in the merchant fleet. "There is also not as many youth coming through various sailing academies and entering into the maritime sector locally and further afield." Fraser Coleman, 20, is currently studying marine biology at University of Exeter and also works as a temporary marine attendant at Guernsey Ports. He said: "I don't think there is enough advertising for it because, unless you're really into it, it is not that pushed." Mr Higgs said that staff do go into schools but he thought more needed to be done to encourage young people into the industry. He said: "There is probably work for us to do there, attending schools and career days, which we have done and will continue to do to try and increase that. We do get some interest but I would like to see that double. "It's maybe not the sector that is of particular interest to youth these days and I think we need to change that culture because it is still a very interesting, exciting career. "And, hopefully, people on the island can appreciate how important this sector is to us." Follow BBC Guernsey on X and Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to Guernsey Ports announces marine business rebrand Guernsey harbour plans submitted for debate DFDS calls for 'as many apprentices' as possible Guernsey Ports


BBC News
2 hours ago
- Business
- BBC News
New course aims to attract people to Guernsey maritime sector
A course is being launched in Guernsey over concerns about the general decline of young people entering the maritime island has a rich maritime history and 98% of freight that comes in into the island arrives through St Peter Port and St Sampson harbour master Kieran Higgs said the aim was to invest in the future by supporting younger people in the island to pursue the industry as a new apprenticeship course could be ready this September and it is hoped this will lead to full time jobs in the sector. After studying marine biology at Anglia Ruskin University Ellie Wilson began her career at Sea Fisheries where she works as a commercial said: "A couple of years ago I was looking into getting some qualifications and to do your practical - even just your day skipper - is not something you can do over here. You have to either go to Jersey or abroad to somewhere else. "So I found that really difficult and the way I have got into everything is more just from stepping stones of starting one thing and then going into something else."She plans to leave in September to go to the Isle of Wight to study a superyacht cadetship at completion of the course she will become a qualified officer of the watch, which means she can be an officer of the watch on boats under 3000 tonnes. Mr Higgs said: "I think there is generally a decline in British seafarers globally in the merchant fleet. "There is also not as many youth coming through various sailing academies and entering into the maritime sector locally and further afield." Fraser Coleman, 20, is currently studying marine biology at University of Exeter and also works as a temporary marine attendant at Guernsey Ports. He said: "I don't think there is enough advertising for it because unless you're really into it, it is not that pushed."Mr Higgs said that they do go into schools but he thinks more needs to be done to encourage young people into the industry. He said: "There is probably work for us to do there, attending schools and career days, which we have done and will continue to do to try and increase that. We do get some interest but I would like to see that double."It's maybe not the sector that is of particular interest to youth these days and I think we need to change that culture because it is still a very interesting, exciting career. "And hopefully, people on the Island can appreciate how important this sector is to us."


The Guardian
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Tiny melodies': musician uses moths' flight data to compose piece about their decline
They are vital pollinators who come out at night, but now moths have emerged into the bright light of day as co-creators of a new piece of music – composed using the insects' own flight data. Ellie Wilson composed Moth x Human in a protected habitat on Parsonage Down in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She assigned each of the 80 resident moth species a different sound, which was triggered when it landed on her monitor. Around the automated melody created by the moths, she composed music for live violin, cello, trombone, piano and synths. Wilson will be interviewed and the piece performed twice, at London's Southbank Centre on 5 July as part of the New Music Biennial. 'I wanted to compose a piece of music that was, in part, created by the insects themselves,' said Wilson. 'The moths randomly created these little tiny melodies – little fragments and motifs which I used to compose the rest of the piece, including tapping on the body of the cello to imitate the sound of a moth getting trapped in a lamp.' Moth populations are experiencing steep declines across the globe due to habitat loss, pesticides, and the climate crisis. This has a knock-on effect on the ecosystem because moths are an important food source for bats, owls and birds – but also because moths are critical to pollination, albeit in ways that are still not fully understand. 'Many of us don't see moth numbers declining because they come out at night but they're just as vital to our ecosystem as bees and butterflies,' said Wilson. Wilson created the work with the support of Oxford Contemporary Music and with biodiversity scientists at the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology. The piece highlights the impact of the decline of the UK moth populations by ending with data from a different area: a farmland monoculture with only 19 moth species. 'I wanted the difference in moth populations to be audible,' said Wilson. 'There's so much sound at the beginning of the piece. At the end, there's very little.' Wilson said the scientists she teamed up with were enthusiastic about their work being turned into music. 'They've been trying to get the message across about catastrophic moth decline but they can't get traction using figures and data,' she said. 'Music is an accessible way for people to understand the disaster unfolding.' Wilson is not the only UK musician using nature to draw attention to the climate breakdown: Cosmo Sheldrake is appealing against the refusal of his legal attempt for the Ecuador forest to be recognised as a co-creator of a song he wrote. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion 'The nature of the ecological crisis is fast, so striking, so completely urgent and total – and natural sounds have so much charisma and power – that music based on nature can reveal and communicate things about the natural world far more effectively and powerfully than science can,' Sheldrake said. 'So much can be revealed from listening to ecosystems,' he added. 'Removing a single tree devastates the soundscape even though the forest might not look any different.' Radio Lento recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, streaming 'captured quiet' from 105 locations in 26 UK counties. And the UK-based design and architecture firm Heatherwick Studio is transforming an uninhabited island in Seoul, South Korea, into a public park, featuring musical performances based on soundwaves created by the mountainous terrain. But Finland has taken things one step further, becoming the first country in the world to create an official soundscape.


The Guardian
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
New Music Biennial review – sitars, thorax-quaking bass and vibrators
'Growling through the trombone is a new one for me,' admitted one musician between performances of Ailís Ní Ríain's work Holocene. Bradford Cathedral echoed with squawks, rattles and primordial grumbling as the combined forces of Onyx Brass and Hammonds Band conjured Ní Ríain's vivid soundscape of life on Earth 11,000 years ago (imagine prehistoric megafauna getting the Jaws treatment). But those lower brass growls weren't the score's most daring feature. That honour goes to the four percussionists who teased waves of soft rustling from cymbals with small battery-operated vibrators. All in a day's work at the New Music Biennial – now in its fifth iteration and hosted this year in Bradford, UK City of Culture 2025, before the same lineup of 20 short pieces decamps to London's Southbank Centre in July. Most weren't strictly world premieres (nor is the Biennial strictly biennial) but as a free showcase of activity across the UK music scene, there's nothing quite like it. Folk, jazz and electronic artists appear alongside classical ensembles – though such labels mean little when most of the featured music crosses such boundaries as standard. Composer and violinist Ellie Wilson's haunting Moth x Human, for instance, turned data about night-time moth activity into a beguiling synthesised fabric ('the moths are collaborating') with which her small acoustic ensemble duetted in The Loading Bay, an unused warehouse and building site converted into two intimate performance venues and an art gallery. Xenia Pestova Bennett's Glow was a shimmering, spooky set of movements for magnetic resonator piano and Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble, woven through with spine-tingling recorded narration about weird light phenomena in Danish, Welsh and Turkish. Sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun's Into the Night – bringing together five Indian classical musicians with the BBC Concert Orchestra – was his latest thrilling example of cross-cultural collaboration, the orchestra amplifying and harmonising the two raags on which the Indian classical musicians improvised, nods and smiles passing between them. Less persuasive (despite a fearless performance by the Carice Singers and conductor George Parris) was Daniel Kidane's fiendishly difficult N'dehou, a rambling, pointillistic tapestry of syllables inspired by a Cameroonian single-note bamboo flute. In a longstanding feature of the New Music Biennial, each work is played twice, sandwiching a short interview. 'What's the difference between the piece we just heard and commercial dance music?' asked the presenter between performances of Alex Groves' Dance Suite in a small subterranean nightclub. 'I don't think there is one,' grinned Groves. And it's true that the grimy, thorax-quaking bass, looped vocal melodies and rhythmic prestidigitation of Zubin Kanga's virtuosic performance – on laptop, keyboard and Midi-controlling Roli Seaboard – were obviously at home in the space in a way most of the audience were not. The huge, unnamed difference, however, was the invitation to listen closely and admire how Dance Suite functioned as a 'set of baroque dances for the 21st century' (hardly a conventional description of most electronic dance music): a reminder of the radical impact of how we talk about music – any music – on what we end up hearing. At the Southbank Centre 4-6 July.


BBC News
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Nature reserve's moths help composer make new music
Music that explores declining biodiversity has been created using the activity of 80 species of moth during an evening at a nature at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology collected data on the moths at Parsonage Down Nature Reserve, near Salisbury, in Wiltshire, and shared it with professional musician Ellie Wilson."I assigned sounds to the individual species of moth," explained Ms Wilson, from London. "As that moth appeared that evening, you hear a sound." Premieres of the 12-minute piece, called Moth x Human and which is played alongside live musicians, will be held at the Southbank Centre and at the Bradford City of Culture 2025. The four-hour recording at Parsonage Down in August detected a variety of different moth species, including elephant hawk, burnished brass, water veneer and ruby tiger Wilson said the data was put through a computer and she attached sounds to the movement of each species and "pressed play"."It's the ebb and flow of their activity that night," she explained, rather than the literal sound of moths, which are usually very quiet."It's like a chat between moths and humans." While Ms Wilson, who is a classically trained composer violinist, admitted it was out of her "comfort zone", she said she wanted to explore biodiversity and the idea to use the insect activity came to her at breakfast one Wilson was then commissioned for the project by the Oxford Contemporary Music charity."The message I'm trying to get across in the music is a celebration of moths," Ms Wilson told the BBC, adding they are important pollinators but are often "forgotten". She worked with the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology to get the data."Scientists have automated moth activity systems," she said. "They put them out on different locations to analyse the land. "They have cameras on them - so every time a moth is attracted to the light, the camera takes a picture and they use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the species."In contrast to the 80 species at the Wiltshire nature reserve, Ms Wilson said data shared with her from farmland where pesticides had been used only detected 19 species of moth. Stuart Hales, from Natural England, which owns the Parsonage Down reserve, said: "National nature reserves are our most important places for nature, so it's exciting to see Parsonage Down providing inspiration for the arts, in addition to being crucial for conservation."The piece will have its first airing in Bradford on 7 June and then will also be played at the Southbank Centre in London on 5 July, as part of a New Music Biennial from the PRS Foundation, which is a free festival.