Sam Landsman, who graduated from UW ChemE with his bachelor's degree this year, is doing something slightly different. Thanks to him, we can now listen to the heat transfer process and tap our feet to its rhythm. In August, his band, Sam Landsman Group, released a jazz album, Transport, with eleven of his compositions, and Sam at the tenor saxophone.
Sam started composing music for the album in September 2013, while enrolled in the ChemE undergraduate program. Browsing through the track list, three songs immediately caught our eyes: Heat Transfer, Mass Transfer and Fluid Dynamics. Heat Transfer - a high-intensity, fast-tempo tune - was the first song Sam wrote for the album. Then he went on to create an entire Transport Processes Suite.
"I used imagery as my inspiration when composing," says Sam. For Mass Transfer, he envisioned the sounds of large rocks rapidly falling to the ground and impacting it. And for Fluid Dynamics, he pictured calm flowing water. "In class, we would describe this scenario as laminar flow with a low Reynolds number!"
"Sam knew he wanted to work in water treatment from day one, and he set his sights on making that goal a reality," says Prof. Brad Holt. "His saxophone was always close by, and whenever a jazz course was housed in a Benson classroom, he'd pop in and play some tunes with them." These days, you can find Sam in Hartford, Connecticut (with his saxophone), where he equally excels at his other career as a water/wastewater treatment engineer at CH2M Hill.
Sam Landsman Group's album Transport is available at samlandsman.bandcamp.com
Shoko Saji