The Dark Side of the Moon: Sonified Astrophysics

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Studio 360 podcast recently focused its microphones on “The Blind Astrophysicist,” as the episode was titled. Its subject is a sight-impaired astrophysicist named Wanda Diaz-Merced, who is from Puerto Rico. According to the reportage, Diaz-Merced began to lose her sight as she was pursuing her studies. She talks in the interview (MP3) about how all her fellow students were straining their eyes to read all the tiny markings in their research data, while she was much more aggressively losing her own vision.

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/studio/studio050611e.mp3|titles=”The Blind Astrophysicist (Studio 360)”|artists=Astrophysicist Wanda Diaz-Merced]

To hear this woman’s voice is to meet someone who doesn’t know of despair, or certainly has an unusually high threshold for it. She tells the story of how she came to explore sonification (alternate terminology: she calls it audification, while the host, Ari Epstein, calls it ensonification), in which data is presented in a way that can be likened to a musical composition. There’s a particularly good anecdote about how during a visit to a computer lab she heard the squeal of data as it was being crunched, and recognized a burst in the static that turned out to be a sunburst. And an even better one when we learn that her computer-programming collaborator is … deaf.

Above is an image from the Studio 360 blog, showing “a graph marked with Braille tags on a pegboard to plot the intensity of light versus frequency for a spiral galaxy. She can figure out the mass of the galaxy by calculating the area under the curve.” It’s just one example of how Diaz-Merced pursues her research not just despite her diminished sense, but because of the manner in which she has learned to make all the more of her retained senses.

The broadcast, of course, focuses less on the tactile than on the aural. Things tagged as or referenced as “sonification” are often transformations into sound art or music information that originated as data that had no express intent to serve as art. Diaz-Merced’s astrophysics projects straddle that line, in that she’s working on music-production software that feeds on data and produces tunes. Still, host Epstein summarizes well the practical research benefits of her efforts: “Even people who can see just fine are better at detecting patterns if they can hear a soundtrack while they’re watching the computer draw a graph. their ears are working in sync with their eyes, to immerse them in the data.”

Original post at studio360.org. The Studio 360 site provides this link for additional info on Diaz: icad.org. Subject originally located via “Senses Working Overtime,” from the blog of my old friend Andrew Jaffe (we went to college together), who is an astrophysicist himself, at Imperial College in London; he also provided this link to Diaz-Merced’s research at Harvard: harvard.edu.

Remixing a Stroll

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Two days ago, after spending many hours with nothing playing but an MP3 that consisted in large part of the mechanical sound of an old turntable making its rotation, I had the sense that I was still hearing the track, even though I was miles from the house, pushing a bright orange three-wheeled stroller in which dozed my eight-month-old. This was along Golden Gate Park, where people regularly park their cars with the apparent interest in having their passenger-side windows broken. The sidewalk there is littered daily with glass, which collects in these dry glistening pools. I had navigated just such a pool of reflective shards, and one of those shards had, it turned out, embedded itself in the rear left wheel of the stroller. With each rotation, there was a scratchy sound, which in time took on the metronomic significance of a beat. The beat sound, in turn, so to speak, brought the ear to bear on what happened the other 350 or so degrees of rotation, when the wheel regained its grip on the pockmarked sidewalk. The sound of that portion of the rotation was weathered down, in a sandpapery way. I reached for my phone, continued to push the stroller, and used the bright red Record button in the Soundcloud.com app to tape 20 seconds of this beat. (It’s an Android phone, but there’s also an iOS version of the app.) The result is as follows:

Some comments began to accumulate on the page where the track is posted for streaming and download, and then 24 hours later an email arrived from Thomas Park, who records prolifically under the name Mystified. He had commented the day prior on my track, which I had titled “Broken Glass in a Stroller Wheel,” and in the intervening hours he had taken my track and produced something new from it, which he titled “Stroller Groove”:

Just looking at the waveforms of the two recordings, it’s clear that only one of these has the inaccuracies inherent in natural-world sound (even if part of that so-called natural world is a mass-produced, human-powered vehicle). The Mystified remix starts with a brief loop selected from the original track, and slowly accrues a veneer of minimal techno. As such, it provides an echo of my walk, in some manner resembling the way that my walk had provided an echo of the turntable MP3 to which I had been listening earlier in the day.

Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet and at soundcloud.com/mystifiedthomas

(Above photo from flickr.com/photos/wheatfields via Creative Commons license.)

The Sonic Signature of Democracy

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Bulldozia‘s “Secret Ballot” is not the score to a previously unheard of Edgar Allan Poe short story, though it easily could be. It’s a recording made by Bulldozia, aka Glasgow-based Alasdair Pettinger, of the process of voting in a recent election. It is the sound of voting. There’s the entry into the hall, the brief dialog with the officiate, the abundant sense of hush, and the documentation of the specific activity itself. Hush isn’t silence, even if it results in silence. Hush is the consensual, communal pressure to be silent, and even if it doesn’t resound, it has has its own vibration, its own vibe.

Writes Pettinger of the setting:

Voting for Scottish Parliament elections (constituency and list candidates) and AV referendum. Recorded 2.30pm, Thu 5 May 2011. Polling stations are — at least inside — quiet places that resemble improvised churches more than anything else, with voting a kind of private prayer. But there are plenty of sounds if you listen for them.

Beyond the meaning that remains hidden in plain sight in that deep silence, secreted in the hush, the municipal prayer of which Pettinger writes, there are other compositional touches.

The first is the opening. It’s a secret ballot, after all, and yet that first door we hear isn’t the door to the ballot booth. It’s the door to the hall. We don’t know this at first, but there’s something of a regressive loop in how we find ourselves as listeners inside a space, only to realize, when a voice comes, that the secret space has yet to be entered. Bulldozia only needs to suggest rooms within rooms once before the listener’s mind fills in the gap, takes the model to its infinite extrapolative horizon.

Then there’s the voice, at first clearly understandable, then muffled by distance and activity (and, for those of us English-speakers not in Scotland, perhaps by accent). The way the room and the activity shape the sound as the speaker recedes from intelligibility suggests a dub-like production, in which echo lends an aura of drama to select sonic elements. And as such, that echo also parallels the room-within-room structure mentioned above.

These are fine examples of the manner in which a well-selected field recording is like a well-shot photograph. A shot framed by the camera lens is often described as “well composed,” and there’s no reason not to employ the word “composition” when describing a a well-conceived field recording.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/bulldozia.

Luciano Berio, Crate Digger

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Luciano Berio, like many classical composers, regularly absorbed pre-existing compositions into his own compositions, blurring the line between tribute and authorship. One of the most expansive of his interpolative works is Sinfonia, which dates from the late 1960s, and which I wrote a brief essay about for publication earlier today at newmusicbox.org: “Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, Generational Perspectives, and the Fluid Nature of Copyright in a Classical Context.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Sinfonia recently, because, as I explain in the essay, the piece had come to triangulate two different personal interests that I’d previously thought of more in parallel. The work is both a successful foray by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic into experimental contemporary music during the 1960s, and a precursor to the sample-based music that is so commonplace in our current time. Sinfonia draws into its whole various material borrowed from, among others, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, Maurice Ravel, Samuel Beckett, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The newmusicbox.org essay isn’t about Berio so much as it’s about our understanding of Berio thanks to the work of the late academic David Osmond-Smith, who made Berio a key focus of his life’s output. The essay came out of a reading of Osmond-Smith’s 1991 career-survey book, Berio, and in advance of a reading of his 1985 book, Playing on Words, which is wholly dedicated to Sinfonia. What’s fascinating about the 1991 book is how it is, I argue, impossible to imagine being written today, because it not for a moment takes into consideration the broader cultural ramifications of Berio’s acts of appropriation, nor does it even touch on the process by which permission for those works was gained.

Now I’m slowly making my way through Playing on Words, the name of which sells short both the book and Sinfonia, because the Berio work doesn’t just play on words, but on melodies and other compositional aspects of the source material. Still, the title does do the job of making clear that both types of material are, in effect, “texts.”

One note from Playing on Words — a footnote, in fact. On page 39, Osmond-Smith states of Sinfonia‘s second movement that “Berio wrote the movement while on holiday in Sicily, and therefore relied upon the few scores that he had with him, those that happened to be available from Catania public library, and his own memory in order to establish a suitable range.” This notion of what’s readily available as a creative constraint is fascinating, in part because it is in contrast with what Osmond-Smith doesn’t appear to probe, which is the creative constraint posed by works Berio desired to adopt but couldn’t obtain permissions for — but also because the image of Berio making of what he could find in the Catania library brings to mind the image of the hip-hop crate digger, making use of what vinyl happens to be available.

I’ll likely summarize some thoughts on Playing on Words when I’ve fully consumed it. In the meanwhile, the Berio/Osmond-Smith essay is here:
“Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, Generational Perspectives, and the Fluid Nature of Copyright in a Classical Context.”

Turntablism Before and After Hip-Hop (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Like the violin, just to point to one parallel example, the turntable has different uses in different settings, means different things in different settings. The violin seen on its own may signal “classical” (whether that means chamber or orchestral is left to the viewer’s imagination), but could just as likely be jazz or bluegrass. The turntable, seen on its lonesome, tends to signal hip-hop — more to the point, the turntable, when seen in pairs, tends to signal hip-hop.

But, of course, the creative employment of the turntable as not just an audio-playback system but also as a means of artistic production, as a performance instrument, is a long tradition. John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 1” included turntables in 1939, which means just as long prior to the birth of hip-hop as we now are far from it. Hip-hop by and large has left the turntable behind in favor of digital samples, but avant-garde use of the turntable continues apace.

Take the work of Jay Sullivan, as recently displayed in a live performance broadcast as part of the Rare Frequency radio show, on WZBC 90.3, and later disseminated more widely as a podcast MP3.

[audio:http://rarefrequency.com/podcasts/Podcast_Spec_Ed_52_Jay_Sullivan_Edit.mp3|titles=”Live on Rare Frequency February 2011″|artists=Jay Sullivan]

The piece begins with the texture of the turntable, the slow warble and mechanical cadence of its rotation, the surface static noise. The introduction of a bellows sound, likely a harmonium (the credits on the site are minimal), serves several compositional purposes. It provides a drone that suggests an affinity for the underlying currents of Indian music. It shifts the opening texture from foreground to background. It suggests the turntable texture as the most minimal of rhythms, to be contrasted with the most minimal of melodies that is a drone. But most importantly, it simulates that distinction between foreground and background: The airy breath of the bellows, like a harmonica or organ on some surreally attenuated sustain, hovers above the texture of the turntable. The turntable surface doesn’t adversely affect the sound, as would be the case if the bellows noise were in fact recorded on the vinyl we hear. Instead, a cavern opens, and we listen to that void as much as we do to what is on either side of it.

Track originally posted at rarefrequency.com.