The first step in my creative process was to choose a topic that resonates with my beliefs, and from which I could create a new poetic perception of reality using scientific theories and data relations. In Sounding Numbers, l worked with neutron stars, deforestation, and ocean pollution, which are part of cosmology and earth sciences. I find that these two fields carry a beautiful feeling of wonder and empowerment, and are great with open-source data.
While reading about these scientific topics such as deforestation, I encountered vast amounts of information, so my first filter was to focus only on scientific dissemination channels and research papers. In order to filter the data sets, I only used open-source CSV files offered by NGOs or governmental institutions that supported the research I read.
The following step was to understand the theory and data. My goal was to create an emotional connection with the material that I decided to work with. Consequently, while reading the theory and data, I looked for potential sound relations between the concepts and my musical universe. Thus, to understand the data, I used data mining analysis techniques, among them clustering, plotting, and predictive algorithms to discover relations and tendencies hidden in the numbers.
These analyses and understandings sparked my imagination with relations between numbers and musical characteristics, e.g. dynamics, shapes, and overtone developments. In my project, the scientific theory was related to musical structures, like the Niche Theory. This theory focuses on the singing range of species, which I used to create linear relations between orchestration and passage developments, by establishing cross-references between instruments.
Throughout Sounding Numbers, I dealt with very concrete materialities from e.g. scientific data sets, to more abstract materialities such as the meaning of blending electronics, multiphonics, and harmonics in relation to data.
Going from scientific theory and its supporting data, to sound design for sonifications. Then further expanding towards participatory sound installations and contemporary electroacoustic compositions, it is possible to map the concreteness or abstraction of the materials and methodologies. A general overview of the process can be seen here:
The subsequent step was to dive into Sound Design. For this task, I let my acoustic creative intentions, described in the previous paragraph, be influenced by emotional memories in connection to the scientific topics I investigated; could my sonification forest’s sound become a mixture of the "niche hypothesis" 1 and my childhood memories? What does the scientific theory mean to me as a composer and my memories of going into the forest with my family? This involved a deep process of reflection and constraints regarding the shape and behavior of the sound. To code them, I used SuperCollider, a dedicated programming language for sound synthesis.
Until this moment, the numbers were silent. The sounds I designed were merely code structures, which to every extent were representations of my aesthetic decisions as a composer. These code structures, I refer to as ‘sound objects’, referencing object-oriented programming and Road Curtis’ definition in ‘Microsound’:
“A basic unit of musical structure, generalizing the traditional concept of note to include complex and mutating sound events” 2
Briefly described, these sound objects operate as units for sound potential. Once they process the data a sonification is created - and finally, the numbers are sounding!
In an overall sense, the sonifications contain a narrative that can be understood both through data analysis and through the unfolding of their sound. With these unfolding in Sounding Numbers, the numbers were suddenly not voiceless anymore. They instantaneously showed contours, forms, interactive intervallic relations, and textural developments, that were previously silent. As a composer I listened to them, carefully, to understand the emotional side of that narrative and to create a musical universe of my own.
My artistic outcome in this project was highly integrated into these narratives, especially in the way I accessed the interactive quality of the sound. At this stage, I asked myself how could the different qualities of the sonifications be translated into playability to create interaction and accessibility? both for performers and the audience.
The answer to this question was two-sided. On one side, I explored sensorial technology, MIDI controllers, and physical actions like planting seeds, to create an emotional perception of the sound in connection to our physicality. On the other side, I explored the immersive and complex qualities of data mapping and algorithms, to construct dense textural relations and maintain a sense of curiosity. Both sides were applied to my two types of artistic outcomes: participatory sound installations and contemporary electroacoustic compositions. But on a more discrete categorization, the first applies to the sound installations, while the second to my music compositions.