Award: Gold

Institution: Harvard University

Title of Entry: One Small Step for Music

About this Entry: “Sound itself has always been an obscure object of desire and fascination,” observes one source toward the end of this intriguing profile of Harvard musicologist Alexander Rehding and his curious and surprisingly moving approach to music. The story follows the professor, born in Hamburg, Germany, to a “wholly unmusical” family, down a series of rabbit holes, interrogating how human perception shapes the way we perceive sound and exploring the vast palette of music that exists beyond the reach of our ears. By thinking about music fundamentally as an organizer of time, Rehding makes the study of it relevant to other fields: biology, physics, cosmology, philosophy. He’s worked with physicists on sirens and with biologists on whale songs and the sonic perception of fruit flies; he’s worked with NASA officials to theorize how aliens might hear and analyze The Golden Record. What emerges from this profile—written by staff writer and editor Jacob Sweet, himself a classical musician—is a profoundly shifted and expanded view of what music is. As Rehding says in the closing lines, that remains, fundamentally, an unanswered question.