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:
This feels like sensing the world as a child again, immersed in extreme curiosity, did I ever forget? The tactile, the smells, the light, the sounds, isn't everything the same? I listen to the flowers dancing with the bees, and the sun burning my skin. I feel them as acts of intense beauty, and I listen to them with my heart and with my mind, in silence, in loudness, in soundings, in numbers. What do they say? How do they sound?
Our sensorial world is connected and extended by technology, compiling data, number after number, to explore deeper meanings of our realities. Satellites, telescopes, and sensors measuring heat, temperature, pressure, or gasses like CO2, which is released when we cut a tree, for it to be captured mostly by our oceans, eventually raising sea levels.
These numbers are telling stories. Stories of our perceptions. Perceived potential for communication. A message with textures, heights, densities, form, movements, times, beginnings, and ends… all measurements, showing the reality of a world that is no longer the one we remembered.
These measurements are my raw materialities: events brutally converted into quantities, positions, and representations of properties like viscosity, density, spin, or rotation. In their measurement, they contain a voiceless story. Can you hear what they say? Can you hear the whispers and the chants of the sounding numbers?
I have always been interested in ___________ and its_______________ possibilities to create a perceived meaning of reality. As a child, every time I would engage with new knowledge, it would feel like life-changing questions, thus developing an emotional connection to them.
After the code and the mapping of the data were ready. I pressed play, and suddenly the numbers sounded, showing textures, relations, forms, and unexpected movements. I could have written something different, another code, other sounds, and it would have sounded almost the same.
It was clear in this moment, that I created a story based on my interpretation of the theory and the numbers - in combination with what I imagined it should sound and feel. I felt how the idea of interpreting the data and theory became one with my aesthetic desires and in resonance with my body. It made me wonder how can I listen to these numbers, their meaning, the story they convey, and the knowledge they represent?
This question became key in my research, as it showed the _________________ ______ and philosophical meaning of science in connection to my musical intentions. For then, the sound of the numbers was just a figment of my imagination within a process that had a cultural belonging to be questioned, and cultural limits to be pushed by the new world that the sonifications were offering.
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.
I believe in the power of sound, for then I believe in music as a transformative experience for societies, through the emotionality that art awakens.
I believe that art can seek the democratization of knowledge through empowered critical thought, and it can develop tools for new perspectives on reality.