With these tools, I created participatory sound installations and contemporary music compositions for an electroacoustic music group. My intention behind the participatory sound installations was to explore embodied actions that could involve the participants in political micro-activism activities. In contrast, the contemporary music pieces seek a poetic perspective through musical performance, within a more conventional performer/audience domain.
In this project, I worked with sonifications, which is “the transformation of data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal to facilitate communication or interpretation” (Sonification Report, 1999). To create them, I wrote code in SuperCollider (a sound synthesis programming language) based on data analysis and conceptual representation of the theory behind the data, and when the data is read by the code, the sonification is created.
I conducted my artistic practice-based research project Sounding Numbers, as part of the Advanced Postgraduate Diploma at the Rythmic Music Conservatory, from September 2020 until June 2022.
During this time, I researched how to create sounds with scientific data and how to use these sounds for artistic outcomes. I used programming techniques to find structures and relations between the data, the scientific theories, and sound potentialities, where I explored textures, qualities, different data mappings, and ways for sound deployment, development, and cessation in a musical context. In brief, I investigated how can I use different data sets to craft synergies between science and my aesthetic music universe, under the research question:
How can I use scientific data sets to create expressive sounding tools
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for contemporary composition and participatory sound installations?
I believe that the artistic beauty of these sonifications lies in the potential poetry that can be unfolded from them- whilst simultaneously representing hard data from reality.
In Sounding Numbers, I searched for sound structures and textures to raise curiosity, to show a dystopic reality through an emotional soundscape, full of hope and beautiful darkness, seeking a meaning that could lead towards an empowered critical thought. Ultimately, this project aimed to propose questions through the embodied action of emotional transgression.
My ambition with this project was to investigate the performative and aesthetic potentialities of sonifications, within a composition and installation context, by programming the sounds and ways of interaction.
My intention was to build a deeper and personal connection between my musical universe and science, as I believe that the resulting artwork could be a powerful dissemination tool to actively engage an audience under unexplored world views and understandings for a better society.