Sound Recording – the eighth nerve

Like the Sea Itself

Tom Williams’ Like the Sea Itself (2024) is a work for cello, fixed media and live Kyma electronics. Cellist Madeleine Shapiro will be performing the work at ICMC2025 Boston (where it was selected in a double blind review process) and at NYCEMF 2025.

Described as “a musical meditation on the elemental nature of the sea,” Williams developed the work in close collaboration with New York cellist Madeleine Shapiro and was deeply influenced by Alice Oswald’s poetry on the nature of water. As Oswald writes, “…the sea has endless beginnings.”

Composed over the autumn of 2024, Like the Sea Itself is comprised of two elements: recordings the composer made of the North Sea on the Suffolk coast and recordings of Shapiro improvising on these sea recordings in her apartment in Manhattan, New York.

Created using Kyma and the Pacamara, the fixed media portion is shaped by the energy and turbulence of both the cello recordings and the sea itself.

Like the Sea Itself can performed either as a fixed media sound composition or as a live free improvisation by the cellist to the fixed media sound composition.

Kyma shines at the 2025 Sonification Awards

Two projects powered by Kyma received top honors at the 2025 Sonification Awards this year.

Often likened to a Michelin star in the data sonification world, the Sonification Awards recognize excellence and encourage best practices in the field of transforming data into sound.

• Congratulations to Jon Bellona for his award in the Public Outreach category for The 2015 Axial Seamount Eruption — part of Amy Bower’s Accessible Oceans project. Listen to the winning sonifications below!

• In the Data Analysis category, Carla Scaletti and Martin Gruebele won for the sonifications in their paper “Hydrogen bonding heterogeneity correlates with protein folding transition state passage time as revealed by data sonification” in collaboration with Gruebele’s Protein Sonification group. Dive deeper by reading the paper, or by watching the video summary below:

A 50/50 split

Alan M. Jackson has pledged to share the proceeds from his new track Mediation One in a 50/50 split with his musical collaborators: a choir of birds from his West Sussex garden and another from the South Downs. (The birds’ half of the money goes toward the purchase of high quality RSPB bird food.)

Meditation One (feat. NATURE) features Alan M Jackson on fujara, gong, and modular bells accompanied by West Sussex peri-urban birds (the first bird choir) and the Birds of the South Downs (second bird choir).

Alan’s performance is processed through the Kyma CrossFilter with a “wintry” impulse response: several years ago, he brought a field recorder along on a skiing trip in the French Alps where he captured people skiing past, around and down the slope of some scratchy sounding hard-pack snow which became the impulse response for this spring (as in the season) reverberation.

The “first choir” of birds was recorded from Alan’s studio window (he had to EQ away the traffic noise). He decided to perform outdoors along with this track on a local iron-age hill fort. While he was was mixing, he noticed that the birds around him were impressively louder and clearer than the first choir, so he stopped and set up his mics to record them. But by the time he was ready they’d gone quiet. That’s when he realized that the birds had been reacting to hearing the recording of the first choir (probably in a “stressed out, territorial, get-off-my-hill, kind of way”). So he alternated between playing short sections of the first bird choir, then stopping to record the second choir’s reactions.

The cover art comes from a water color painted by Alan on top of the same hill at sunset during the planetary alignment (the white dot is Venus). It’s an hour hike down from the top so staying to paint the sunset meant he had to stumble back in the dark (that part is not depicted in the painting).

Audience choice: SEAMUS 2023

You can hear Kyma sounds in two of the selections of Volume 33 of audience-selected works from the 2023 SEAMUS National Conference in New York City.

Composer Chi Wang describes her instrumentation in Transparent Affordance as a “data-driven instrument.” Data is derived from touching, titling, and rotating an iPad along with a “custom made box” of her own design. Near the end of the piece Wang uses the “box” to great effect. She places the iPad in the box and taps on the outside. Data is still transmitted to Kyma even without direct interaction, though the sounds are now generated in a much more sparse manner as though the iPad needs to rest or the performer decides to contain it. Finally the top is put on the box as one last flurry of sound escapes.

Scott L. Miller describes his piece Eidolon as “…a phantom film score I thought I heard on a transatlantic flight…” Although the film may not exist to guide us through a narrative, the soundtrack does exist and takes the place of visual storytelling. Eidolon, scored for flute, violin, clarinet, and percussion with Kyma, blurs the lines between what the performers are creating and what the electronic sounds are, an aspect of how we hear the world: we can alternately isolate and focus on sounds to identify them and we can also widen our ears to absorb a sonic texture or a soundscape. Electronic sounds were synthesized in Kyma using additive synthesis, mostly partials 17 – 32 of sub-audio fundamentals.

Sounding the ocean

In June 2024, Jon Bellona presented a paper at the 2024 International Conference on Auditory Display in Troy, NY on behalf of the NSF-funded Accessible Oceans project team. The paper, Iterative Design of Auditory Displays Involving Data Sonifications and Authentic Ocean Data, outlines their auditory display framework and their use of Kyma for all of their data sonification. Program with links to all papers are accessible online at https://icad2024.icad.org/program/

During the presentation, Jon played the full 2015 Axial Seamount Eruption. When an audience member asked about his use of earcon wrappers around each sonification, Jon shared a story about how his interviews with teachers at Perkins School for the Blind led him to include this feature.

In the coming year, Bellona plans to continue his work doing sonification with Kyma as part of a new project funded through NOAA: A Sanctuary in Sound: Increasing Accessibility to Gray’s Reef Data through Auditory Displays with Jessica Roberts, director of the Technology-Integrated Learning Environments (TILEs) Lab at Georgia Tech.

The Sounds of Data

In the July 11 2024 of Physics Magazine, host Julie Gould speaks with scientists who rely on senses other than sight, such as hearing and touch, to interpret data and communicate their research. They use sonification — the transformation of data into sound — to “listen” to hydrogen bonds, interpret gravitational-wave signals, and communicate a wide range of astrophysical data. Sonification also offers tools for visually impaired researchers and scientific outreach.

Included in the podcast are Martin Gruebele (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Carla Scaletti (Symbolic Sound Corporation) describing how they could hear patterns of hydrogen-bond formation during protein folding that had been missed when relying solely on visual representations. (Their research is described in the 28 May 2024 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Hydrogen bonding heterogeneity correlates with protein folding transition state passage time as revealed by data sonification”).

Leaving a trace…

Composer Tom Williams used Kyma to extensively transform the sonic materials in his 2023 acousmatic composition Piano Trace, performed at multiple festivals including Jauna Muzika 2023 in Vilnius, Noisefloor 2024 in Lisbon; Spatial Audio Gathering, DMU, Leicester; NYCEMF2024, New York. Williams, who has a doctorate in music composition from Boston University, currently heads the Music Production MA program at Coventry University.

Piano Trace is conceived as an unfolding of trace material that marks its original source: soundings made on an upright piano. Williams writes:

This is my piano. The piano that has been by my side as a tool for composition but never, until now, the actual source of my composition. A pocketful of playful recordings from the soundboard, piano keys, pedals and strings are the sonic roots. Throughout, and within the transformations and messing-up of the source sounds, there lies an inherent trace, a timbral DNA, a semblance of sonic integrity that is the ephemeral body of Piano Trace.

Data sonification for scientific exploration & discovery

Data sonification, often used for outreach, education and accessibility, is also an effective tool for scientific exploration and discovery!

Working from the Lindorff-Larsen et al Science (2011) atomic-level molecular dynamics simulation of multiple folding and unfolding events in the WW domain, we heard (and analytically confirmed) correlations between hydrogen bond dynamics and the speed of a protein (un)folding transition.

The results were published this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), vol. 121 no. 22, 28 May 2024: “Hydrogen bonding heterogeneity correlates with protein folding transition state passage time as revealed by data sonification”

Congratulations to everyone in the Biophysics Sonification Group:

Carla Scaletti (1), Premila P. Samuel Russell (2), Kurt J. Hebel (1), Meredith M. Rickard (2), Mayank Boob (2), Franz Danksagmüller (9), Stephen A. Taylor (7), Taras V. Pogorelov (2,3,4,5,6), and Martin Gruebele (2,3,5,8)

(1) Symbolic Sound Corporation, Champaign, IL 61820, United States;
(2) Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, United States;
(3) Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, United States;
(4) School of Chemical Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, United States;
(5) Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, United States;
(6) National Center for Supercomputer Applications, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, United States;
(7) School of Music, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, United States;
(8) Department of Physics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, United States;
(9) Musikhochschule Lübeck, 23552 Lübeck, Germany

Accessible Oceans Survey

Graph depicting the flux of CO2 between ocean and atmosphere as measured by the Coastal Endurance array off the coast of New England
Amy Bower (WHOI) and Jon Bellona (UO) invite you to participate in a survey for “Accessible Oceans“, a project focused on designing effective auditory displays to enhance the perception and understanding of ocean data for visitors to museums, aquariums and science centers, including those who are blind or have low vision. Your feedback is crucial in evaluating the effectiveness of their auditory display prototypes.

In this survey, you will listen to a series of auditory displays featuring data sonification, narration, and music. The survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete. Please note that this is not a test of your abilities; rather, it is an opportunity for you to contribute to the advancement of inclusive learning experiences for everyone.

You can participate in this study if you are 12 years old or older, understand English, and are physically located in the US. To participate, simply click on this survey link. Headphones are recommended for the best listening experience. The survey will be closed on June 1 2024.

misfold in Hamburg

misfold is a piece for pipe organ and Kyma electronics, commissioned by Franz Danksagmüller for org_art_lab in Hamburg 6-12 November 2023, a workshop dedicated to collaborations involving art, science, and the pipe organ. But not just any pipe organ…

The HyperOrgan that Franz helped design for St Nikolai church has been augmented with new timbres, percussion sounds, enhanced touch sensitivity and air-flow control, microphones placed among the pipes for electronic signal processing, speakers in the loft so you can blend the organ sound with electronic sound synthesis, and bidirectional MIDI control. The console in the loft has five manuals and a pedal board, each one controllable by a separate MIDI input channel, with the ranges and timbres controlled by the stops.

In keeping with the theme of the workshop (hyper-organ-art & science collaborations), the composer employed data from protein-folding simulations computed at Martin Gruebele’s lab at the University of Illinois to generate the sound and structure of the piece.

Why is it named misfold?

It feels like we’re at a tipping point, and it’s unclear which direction things will take. There’s a pervasive sense of instability across multiple spheres — political, cultural, technological, economic, climatic:

Will these instabilities continue to increase, resulting in a catastrophic breakdown?
Will we “mis-fold” into a familiar & somewhat comfortable, but sub-optimal state?
Or could we use this time of instability to explore possibilities that we haven’t thought of trying before and maybe discover a better way forward?

MISFOLD by Carla Scaletti from Franz Danksagmüller on Vimeo.