I believe in taking action, and that science that utterly benefits humankind can be empowered by sound. I think that topics such as the stars, deforestation, and ocean pollution, among others, can create a poetic perspective of transformation, humbleness, and compassion.
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 its theories and data relations. For this project, 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 the NGOs or governmental institutions that supported the research I read.
During a presentation of my research, I got asked why data matters? Is it not the same to be inspired by a scientific theory and use random numbers? Great question!
The numbers are telling a story, they are showing meaning in time, and with that, structures, and possibilities for deployment, development, and cessation of sounds.
Briefly put, it would not be the same to use data showing the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere or the level of the ocean rising at exponential rates, compared to using a set of random numbers which most common value tends to be zero or even a decreasing curve. These are different narratives, one showing an increasing tendency, and the other showing an almost flat progression. Thus, I composed and created my pieces after doing data analysis and understanding my data sets. In that sense, no, it is not the same to use random data.
Each sonification reflects on specific emotional memories and scientific topics. But there is one that exemplifies how a cross-disciplinary relation can be generated in many domains to conceive an artistic-poetic perspective.
I AM THE OCEAN’s sonification was inspired by Timothy Morton’s book ‘Hyperobjects, philosophy and ecology after the end of the world’. For this piece, I decided to work with postmodern philosophy instead of scientific theories, as I sought to confront my emotional and philosophical state of creation with a post-modernist dissertation. This dissertation challenges the idea of climate change by opening questions for action.
In his book, Morton states that global warming is a “hyperobject of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that challenges our comprehension”, by “defeat[ing] the traditional idea of what a thing is in the first place”. He argues that “such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning. Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in” 1
The first part of his book is an exquisite description of what a hyperobject is. He describes characteristics such as phasing, viscosity, and temporal undulation, among others, that fit perfectly with my music language and textural associations to sound design.
After reading his book and taking notes on my sounding associations, I closed my eyes and reflected on how I would feel the ocean if I could be everywhere? if I could be all the creatures, all the stones, and grains of dust at the same time? how would the strength of the water currents feel, and how would they move to meet and repel each other?
This process created images for my sound design. I coded my sounds by creating a connection, for example, between Morton's description of viscosity, my feeling of the densities at the bottom of the ocean, and a technical translation of which kind of soundwave I should use or what kind of reverb. As well as the inner relations between the open parameters of my code and how to map the data.
In my ocean sonification sound design, the coded layers are represented by under-currents as dark, strong, and assertive, mid-currents as thin sound with dusty metallic reflection, and drops of CO2 falling into a body of water, as resonating, enchanting sweet drops for the end of the world.
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 like scientific data sets, to more abstract materialities such as the meaning of blending electronics, multiphonics, and harmonics in relation to that data.
From the scientific theory and its supporting data, to sound design for sonifications, towards participatory sound installations and contemporary electroacoustic compositions, it is possible to map the concreteness or abstraction of the materials that I worked with and the methodologies I used for each one of my pieces. A general overview of the map would be:
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 the forest’s sound become a mixture of the niche theory 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 meant 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 just coding structures, that to every extent were influenced-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’ as:
“A basic unit of musical structure, generalizing the traditional concept of note to include complex and mutating sound events”
Briefly, these sound objects operate as units for sound potential, that once these process the data, a sonification is created, and finally the numbers are sounding!
In an overall sense, these sonifications contain a narrative that can be understood from their data analyses to the actual unfolding of their sound. In my project, it was with these unfoldings that suddenly the numbers were not voiceless anymore. They suddenly showed contours, forms, interactive intervallic relations, and textural developments that were previously silent. And as a composer I listened to them, carefully, to understand the emotional side of that narrative and create a musical universe of my own.
My artistic outcome on 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.
It feels redundant to say that I listen to the emotionality of the sonification, because the voice of my coded sound objects, was created by using my emotional memories, to begin with. So, am I hearing my own emotionality again? Yes, it is biased! But nevertheless, the numbers in themselves have a story of their own. So, it is in the mixture of their narrative, and the emotional coded sounds that I find a very powerful key to unlocking and pushing the limits of my own musical universe.