Category: Data-driven sound

Spirals within spirals

Carlos Alberto Augusto’s new opera — “TMIE: on the threshold of the outside world” (TMIE is an acronym for Trans Membrane Inner Ear) — for soprano and electronic track, interleaves three stories of audition and spirals. A single soprano plays three women — a Selene goddess, a deaf astronomer named Henrietta Leavitt who “heard what the stars were telling her”, and Beverly Biderman, a Canadian who underwent cochlear implant surgery to regain the pleasure of music.

Augusto produced the electronic track entirely in Kyma using roulette curves applied to different sonic parameters.

The libretto is based, among other texts, on books by Beverly Biderman and George Johnson.

The work, a Miso Music Portugal production with support from Widex Portugal, premiers on February 25th in Lisbon at the O’culto da Ajuda venue with two more performances on the 26th and 27th, and will start touring Portugal later this year.

 

Kyma at ICMC2015

Kyma had a strong presence at the 2015 International Computer Music Conference in Denton Texas, September 25 — October 1, including live performances by

Jeffrey Stolet,
ICMC2015JeffStolet2

Wang Chi,

Jon Bellona,
JP Bellona ICMC2015.jpg

Jon Bellona angst2

and Sun Hua,
Sun Hua ICMC2015.jpg
a keynote lecture by Symbolic Sound president Carla Scaletti,
ICMC2015 keynote Title Slide

ICMC2015 keynote social brain crowd

ICMC2015 keynote IMS to Platypus

ICMC2015 keynote platypus meets capybara Wang photo

ICMC2015 keynote close2

ICMC2015 keynote SSC in 1989

ICMC2015 keynote smiling at laptop2

ICMC2015 keynote output from the brain

ICMC2015 keynote computer musicians predict the future

ICMC2015 keynote making imaginary real

a one-hour Kyma workshop also presented by Scaletti (new music pioneer Larry Austin is seen in the audience at the lower left)
Kyma workshop ICMC2015 photo by Chi Wang

and fixed media pieces by Fred Szymanski and Jinshuo Feng. (If we’ve left anyone out, please let us know!)

Thanks to the ICMC 2015 organizers, presenters, and composers!

Special thanks to the ICMC organizers, Wang Chi, Sun Hua, and Jon Bellona for the photos and Iacopo Sinigaglia for the video excerpt.

QUANTUM in the desert: art, science, technology & collaboration

In April 2015, QUANTUM, the dance piece Jobin created inspired by his residency at CERN, will be touring northern Mexico including Culiacan, Hermosillo, Tijuana, Ensenada and Mexicali. Technical director Marie Predour will be running the live sound for the piece using a Kyma 7 Timeline.

Choreographer Gilles Jobin took a moment to talk a little about the piece, to explain his ideas on algorithmic choreography and to reflect on collaboration, art, science, and technology.

 

What’s interesting about technology is not so much the technology as a tool, but technology as a new way of thinking — as a different way to organize your work or to think about your work. The same is true when choreographers work with scientists or with musicians. There is a kind of exchange of practices that is enriching for everybody.

14 April Culiacan РFestival Danza Jos̩ Limon

16 April Hermosillo – Un Desierto Para La Danza

19 April Tijuana – Cuerpos in Transito

21 April Ensenada – Espuma Cuantica

23 April Mexicali – Entre Fronteras

27 April to 2 May Torreon – Gilles Jobin will be on the jury for Premio Nacional Guillermo Arriaga

aroundNorth around Northern Ireland

If the stars were a musical instrument, how would they sound? As the Earth spins on its axis, and day becomes night becomes day, our view on the near universe changes as reflected by the changing positions of the stars in the sky. One star appears to stay stationary (the North Star); and the rest take about 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds to complete one complete revolution. Robert Jarvis’ aroundNorth is an eight-channel sound installation created entirely in Kyma 7 that offers listeners an opportunity to hear this phenomenon in real time. As each star crosses one of the equally spaced virtual lines emanating from Celestial North Pole, a sound associated with that star and its characteristics is heard at the corresponding position in the sky, its size, its distance from Earth, its brightness and its temperature, creating a mesmerizing sound map of the universe as viewed by our turning planet.

aroundNorth, will be touring Northern Ireland throughout the month of March 2015, culminating in the work’s permanent installation at Armagh Observatory. The tour begins on the shores of Lough Neagh, at Oxford Island, the first Dark Sky site in Northern Ireland, proceed to the top of Divis & the Black Mountain National Trust Park, and then on to Armagh. The installation will also travel to Colin Allotments in West Belfast before travelling to Derry for a special performance to coincide with the deep partial eclipse of the sun on the morning of Friday 20th March 2015. There will then be an evening performance in the sports grounds at St Cecila’s College before the final event at the spectacular Beaghmore Stones complex, near Cookstown in County Tyrone.

By mapping the parameters of the stars through the medium of sound, aroundNorth changes the way we think about our stellar neighbors. As stars move across the score’s virtual lines, brighter stars sound longer, fading in and fading out as they move across the score’s virtual lines, while fainter stars sound shorter; stars that are closer sound louder; hotter stars crackle corresponding to their heat; and, bigger stars sound deeper whilst smaller stars are higher sounding.

aroundNorth humanizes the astronomical, giving us an emotional key to help us relate the unfathomable heavens to our own experiences of time and space. With echoes of a Neolithic monument of ancient myth, the installation introduces us to a universe full of interest, encouraging us to think differently about the cosmos and our place within it.

Scroll down for a full schedule of when and where you can experience aroundNorth this month.

THU 12
Lough Neagh Discovery Centre, Oxford Island, Craigavon BT66 6NJ
FREE 7pm – 9pm

SAT 14
Divis & the Black Mountain, Divis Road, Hannahstown BT17 0NG
FREE 6.30pm – 9pm (Approx 20 minute walk to installation area)

TUE 17
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 2.30pm – 4pm

WED 18
Colin Allotments, Upper Colin Glen Rd, Belfast BT17 0LR
FREE 7pm – 9pm

THU 19
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 2.30pm – 4pm

FRI 20
St Cecilia’s College Sports Ground, Fanad Drive, Derry BT48 9QE
FREE 7pm – 9pm

SAT 21
Beaghmore Stones, Blackrock Road, Cookstown BT80 9PB
FREE 6pm – 9pm (Visitors required to walk over rough ground)

MON 23 & EVERY MON, TUE, WED, THU & FRI until further notice
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 9.30am – 5pm

What if the stars made music

Outdoor Culture presents Sounds of the Night Sky featuring Robert Jarvis‘ sound installation: aroundNorth, opening Thursday 20 February 2014 6.30-9.30 pm at the National Trust Stowe New Inn Farm Buckingham MK18 5EQ

This outdoor event will showcase the premier of Robert Jarvis’ new sound art installation, aroundNorth, a piece that was shortlisted for the 2010 PRS New Music Award.  A multi-speaker sound map of the stars driven by the turning of the Earth, aroundNorth uses Kyma to transform the night sky into a celestial music box rotating around Polaris, the North Star. As each star passes a virtual line in the sky, it triggers a musical note whose qualities are determined by the star’s spectrum, mass, brightness and distance from earth, creating a mesmerising sound map of the universe as viewed from our rotating planet.

Visitors will be accompanied down Bell Gate Drive on foot and into the gardens of Stowe after dark, before entering the semi-wilderness of the newly-opened Lamport Garden where the sounds of moving stars will be created like a giant celestial music box! Dress for the outdoors and bring a flashlight!  Click here for more information and tickets.

Higgs’ Encomium

In Praise of Inference is a 60″ Kyma-generated sound bite celebrating the subtle and sophisticated thought process that goes into inferring the existence of a short-lived particle based only on the traces it leaves behind. Every sound you hear in the example is controlled or ‘modulated’ by data generated by computer models of the proton collisions expected to produce Higgs bosons in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

The sound bite works its way backwards in time, starting with the evidence and then gradually inferring the probable cause. At the beginning you hear two distributions, one on the left and one on the right, each with 500 gamma energy values (each gamma distribution is mapped to a 500-partial filterbank); over time, each gamma distribution morphs to a distribution of Higgs masses, all 500 center frequencies converging on the single high energy/mass value mapped to the high pitch at the end. In the middle, the (static) dR and pTt distributions (also represented by 500-partial spectra controlling filterbanks) fade in and out. Over this backdrop you hear some of the explosive and shivery mappings of jet data (see below).

At the very very end, you may hear a hint of an inference of the voice of the Higgs…

Please play it as loud as your speakers can handle (it sounds best with a subwoofer if you have one). The original is in surround sound but a stereo version was easier to post.

Where did this come from?
Experimental and theoretical particle physicists Lily Asquith and Michael Krämer, in addition to their regular research and teaching duties, have been collaborating with musicians this year on a special project to take the data from some of the quadrillions of proton collisions going on in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and mapping those data sets to sound. Not only are the researchers hoping to hear patterns in the data; they also want to share their passion for exploration and discovery with creative individuals outside of physics.

The project got started last year, when Asquith and composer Richard Dobson created the LHC Sound project, posting sounds and simulated data on the web and inviting musicians to sample the sounds and map the data. Asquith called one of the sets the Jet Game, the object of which was to be able to identify (using only your ears) which of the jets contained evidence of the Higgs boson. Carla Scaletti decided to map several of the jets to sound using Kyma, and the results ended up in the musical score she and Cristian Vogel composed for choreographer Gilles Jobin‘s Spider Galaxies.

At the beginning of this year, Asquith teamed up with Krämer and Scaletti to explore even more ways of mapping data to sound. So far, all the sounds have been generated using simulated data (the real data are top secret), but the trio look forward to having a listen to actual LHC data soon.