Truth and Beauty, Beauty and Truth
hi everyone. thanks for the honor of guest posting on the NAP. i've been a pretty regular reader here since you started, and i've met a few of you through justin. i thought this would be as good of a forum as any to announce that justin and i, after years of on-again-off-again shenanigans, are getting married, and we want to have a huge NAP wedding at pitchfork this year. i hope you all can make it. sorry to keep this from you during your visit last week, wednesday - please forgive - i wanted it to be a surprise. our families and other friends don't know, so please keep it quiet.
for the topic of today's post, i thought i'd start to share with you a little bit about my Big Project (the kind of project that earns capital letters from me). by way of introduction, i am a nasa scientist (lunar program scientist at nasa hq in washington, dc (a city that might earn capital letters from me when we get representation)). i'm also a music producer/engineer/performer with a recording studio here in dc. my life is project-based, and since the violent launch of my music production "business" (where by business i mean "loss" in the realm of tax returns), i have been steadily inching towards working only on Projects of Extreme Importance (PEIs). a discussion of PEI qualification is beyond the scope of this blog post, but could come up again sometime in the future. however, most any project that inhabits the territory at the intersection of science and art is likely to qualify, particularly if the science is astronomy and the art is music.
my Big Project isn't really a new idea, nor is it necessarily a very good one, but it's one i'm prepared to pursue for life. i'm chasing the same cosmic universal Truths that aristotle, pythagoras, kepler, copernicus, helmholz and einstein were chasing, banking on the idea that truth and beauty are one and the same. in on the revolution of heavenly spheres, copernicus says, "Among the many and varied literary and artistic studies upon which the natural talents of man are nourished, I think that those above all should be embraced and purued with the most loving care which have to do with things that are very beautiful and very worthy of knowledge. Such studies are those which deal with the godlike circular movements of the world and the course of the stars, their magnitudes, distances, risings and settings, and the causes of the other appearances in the heavens...For what could be more beautiful than the heavens which contain all beautiful things?"
i came upon copernicus and kepler when i was writing a paper in 1998 called "the mystery of science and man," exploring the influence of astronomy on humanity's collective understanding of itself. what i didn't know was that these guys were motivated by finding the connections between music (specifically harmonic vibrations) and math, geometry and the cosmos. they thought that there must be some universal theory of everything that was ruling all of creation and one of their chosen points of access to the science of astronomy was through music. i haven't been able to shake my fascination with this since then. i also haven't written another paper since then.
big project: step 1
anyway, the first step in my Big Project is to read kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy & Harmonies of the World, which, just in case you might be tempted think i sound like a smart chick, melts my brain into a puddle. this is arguably the coolest book in the history of written language, and possibly the most difficult to understand. consequently, i have been on this step since 2002.
if you don't own a copy of this book, i suggest you order one immediately, perhaps even before reading further. here is one of my favorite little excerpts. i particularly like his idea of what "no need for many words" looks like.
there's something thrilling about trying to read old science books, but the thrill is magnified when it includes pages and pages of obtuse musical notation with equations.
or maybe it's just me.
probably just me, actually.
but i will go on because there is a space to fill here on the NAP today and i have made a commitment. i will try to be brief.
basically, what i am working on is a musical model of the solar system. picture in your head all the planets and their moons all swirling around each other and all of them swirling around the sun. i'm interested in representing them purely, and with the least amount of subjectivity possible, with sound. but not the random, glitchy kind of sound that you often get when sonifying data. no, no. i'm interested in finding those magical mappings of astrophysical parameters to elements of sound that will result in something musical.
i'm not the first one to think of this, but i'm not yet satisfied by any approach that's been explored. the person who has come closest to what i'm thinking is my friend matt wright, a researcher at berkeley and stanford, who made a sound out of a bunch of information about the planets' sizes and periods of revolution.
but i'm more interested in the presentation of the resulting sound/music together with visuals, or better yet, kinetic sculpture or interactive media. there are a few people working in the emerging field of data sonification that are making exciting strides. these guys have made a table that sort of combines the reactable with weather data sonifcation.
another friend of mine, marty quinn, has been sonifying space data for a few years using subjective mappings to scales, rhythms, modes, and chords - sort of like a sophisticated sampling protocol. one of my favorite things of marty's involved the auditory display of mars gamma ray spectrometer data. i really like the way the website gives you a tour of what to listen to and how to interpret the sounds you're hearing.
but it's not enough for me. i want to strip away the subjective choices of scales, modes, etc. and get to as pure a representation of the physical reality as possible.
if you're still reading, but you're feeling a little confused, think of the way a musician converts notes or letters/numbers on a page into music through a set of rules they learn (fingerings, phrasings, volumes). i see the solar system as a giant musical chart begging for the rules to play it. eventually i want to create something that a viewer can tour through - like a 3D virtual space where the audio is part of the tour and you are immersed interactively in space. but that will take a while.
in the meantime, i'm reading and talking to people and unsure of the next step. here's what's on my reading list:
- epitome of cpernican astronomy and harmonies of the world, johannes kepler (prometheus books)
- science & music, jeans (dover)
- music, physics and engineering, olson (dover)
- the music of the spheres, jamie james (grove press)
- measured tones: the interplay of physics and music, ian johnston (institute of physics publishing)
- math and music: harmonius connections, garland and kahn (dale seymour)
- fundamentals of musical acoustics, benade (dover)
- the physics and psychophysics of music: an introduction, roederer (springer-verlag)
- on the sensations of tone, hermann helmholtz (dover)
- the science of sound, rossing, moore, wheeler (addison wesley)
- the physics of sound, berg stork (prentice hall)
i think i'll stop here. i know i'm pushing the envelope here having not once mentioned any band or artist or anything remotely hip. if i'm invited back to guest post again, i promise to be less academic.
if any of you guys are in the bay area on yuri's night (april 12), be sure to check out the huge party. i was there last year and it was almost not even geeky (although my geekiness standards might be questionable). and if you're not in the bay area but you're in any of the other 108 (and counting) cities on any of the 7 continents where they're having a yuri's night celebration, do stop by. if you're into that sort of thing.
--------
epilogue for electramummy:
on talking to aliens - this is the plaque i talked about in the comments.
for the topic of today's post, i thought i'd start to share with you a little bit about my Big Project (the kind of project that earns capital letters from me). by way of introduction, i am a nasa scientist (lunar program scientist at nasa hq in washington, dc (a city that might earn capital letters from me when we get representation)). i'm also a music producer/engineer/performer with a recording studio here in dc. my life is project-based, and since the violent launch of my music production "business" (where by business i mean "loss" in the realm of tax returns), i have been steadily inching towards working only on Projects of Extreme Importance (PEIs). a discussion of PEI qualification is beyond the scope of this blog post, but could come up again sometime in the future. however, most any project that inhabits the territory at the intersection of science and art is likely to qualify, particularly if the science is astronomy and the art is music.
my Big Project isn't really a new idea, nor is it necessarily a very good one, but it's one i'm prepared to pursue for life. i'm chasing the same cosmic universal Truths that aristotle, pythagoras, kepler, copernicus, helmholz and einstein were chasing, banking on the idea that truth and beauty are one and the same. in on the revolution of heavenly spheres, copernicus says, "Among the many and varied literary and artistic studies upon which the natural talents of man are nourished, I think that those above all should be embraced and purued with the most loving care which have to do with things that are very beautiful and very worthy of knowledge. Such studies are those which deal with the godlike circular movements of the world and the course of the stars, their magnitudes, distances, risings and settings, and the causes of the other appearances in the heavens...For what could be more beautiful than the heavens which contain all beautiful things?"
i came upon copernicus and kepler when i was writing a paper in 1998 called "the mystery of science and man," exploring the influence of astronomy on humanity's collective understanding of itself. what i didn't know was that these guys were motivated by finding the connections between music (specifically harmonic vibrations) and math, geometry and the cosmos. they thought that there must be some universal theory of everything that was ruling all of creation and one of their chosen points of access to the science of astronomy was through music. i haven't been able to shake my fascination with this since then. i also haven't written another paper since then.
big project: step 1
anyway, the first step in my Big Project is to read kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy & Harmonies of the World, which, just in case you might be tempted think i sound like a smart chick, melts my brain into a puddle. this is arguably the coolest book in the history of written language, and possibly the most difficult to understand. consequently, i have been on this step since 2002.
if you don't own a copy of this book, i suggest you order one immediately, perhaps even before reading further. here is one of my favorite little excerpts. i particularly like his idea of what "no need for many words" looks like.
there's something thrilling about trying to read old science books, but the thrill is magnified when it includes pages and pages of obtuse musical notation with equations.
or maybe it's just me.
probably just me, actually.
but i will go on because there is a space to fill here on the NAP today and i have made a commitment. i will try to be brief.
basically, what i am working on is a musical model of the solar system. picture in your head all the planets and their moons all swirling around each other and all of them swirling around the sun. i'm interested in representing them purely, and with the least amount of subjectivity possible, with sound. but not the random, glitchy kind of sound that you often get when sonifying data. no, no. i'm interested in finding those magical mappings of astrophysical parameters to elements of sound that will result in something musical.
i'm not the first one to think of this, but i'm not yet satisfied by any approach that's been explored. the person who has come closest to what i'm thinking is my friend matt wright, a researcher at berkeley and stanford, who made a sound out of a bunch of information about the planets' sizes and periods of revolution.
but i'm more interested in the presentation of the resulting sound/music together with visuals, or better yet, kinetic sculpture or interactive media. there are a few people working in the emerging field of data sonification that are making exciting strides. these guys have made a table that sort of combines the reactable with weather data sonifcation.
another friend of mine, marty quinn, has been sonifying space data for a few years using subjective mappings to scales, rhythms, modes, and chords - sort of like a sophisticated sampling protocol. one of my favorite things of marty's involved the auditory display of mars gamma ray spectrometer data. i really like the way the website gives you a tour of what to listen to and how to interpret the sounds you're hearing.
but it's not enough for me. i want to strip away the subjective choices of scales, modes, etc. and get to as pure a representation of the physical reality as possible.
if you're still reading, but you're feeling a little confused, think of the way a musician converts notes or letters/numbers on a page into music through a set of rules they learn (fingerings, phrasings, volumes). i see the solar system as a giant musical chart begging for the rules to play it. eventually i want to create something that a viewer can tour through - like a 3D virtual space where the audio is part of the tour and you are immersed interactively in space. but that will take a while.
in the meantime, i'm reading and talking to people and unsure of the next step. here's what's on my reading list:
- epitome of cpernican astronomy and harmonies of the world, johannes kepler (prometheus books)
- science & music, jeans (dover)
- music, physics and engineering, olson (dover)
- the music of the spheres, jamie james (grove press)
- measured tones: the interplay of physics and music, ian johnston (institute of physics publishing)
- math and music: harmonius connections, garland and kahn (dale seymour)
- fundamentals of musical acoustics, benade (dover)
- the physics and psychophysics of music: an introduction, roederer (springer-verlag)
- on the sensations of tone, hermann helmholtz (dover)
- the science of sound, rossing, moore, wheeler (addison wesley)
- the physics of sound, berg stork (prentice hall)
i think i'll stop here. i know i'm pushing the envelope here having not once mentioned any band or artist or anything remotely hip. if i'm invited back to guest post again, i promise to be less academic.
if any of you guys are in the bay area on yuri's night (april 12), be sure to check out the huge party. i was there last year and it was almost not even geeky (although my geekiness standards might be questionable). and if you're not in the bay area but you're in any of the other 108 (and counting) cities on any of the 7 continents where they're having a yuri's night celebration, do stop by. if you're into that sort of thing.
--------
epilogue for electramummy:
on talking to aliens - this is the plaque i talked about in the comments.
30 Comments:
Nice post, undeniably geeky, and also undeniably cool.
Nice April Fool's joke as well. The Pitchfork bit is what gives me pause, but then again, what do I know?
Since my knowledge of science is so limited as to be basically beyond measure, I will say that as a bookseller, I would recommend reading the Dover books first since they are undoubtedly the cheapest.
I like the grand idea even if I have almost no idea what you're talking about. Thanks for guest posting, and nice job.
I'm going to wallow in my own stupidity now.
I'm going to wallow in my own stupidity now.
the book will help with the wallowing. it's the book i use when i want to wallow in my own stupidity.
thanks for commenting. i thought this might be another zero comment post.
Well, you'd be in good company, because I had one.
Hello there cherry.
Great post. Thanks for filling in. It's nice to have a music post that deviates from the usual content. The Saturn signal was cool and reminded me of old science fiction television shows where control rooms on spaceships and alien invasions sounded like that. When were we first able to hear/interpret and document those signals? I have always been fascinated with the history of communication, and this adds a new dimension to that. What kinds of programs are in place right now, to communicate with Outerspace for the purposes of contacting or keeping the door open for contact with aliens? Can you tell us? Do you have fingerprint/voice/eyeball access to the Vaults where these answers lie? tell us more!
claire - all in good time. i wouldn't want to blow it all on the first post. but to start with, i put a picture of carl sagan's plaque depicting humans that was bolted to the pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts which were only recently turned off after exiting our solar system.
other than that, our transmissions are accidental, and we mostly just listen with big radio ears.
The inherent problem with all this is of course, while whatever you input to get your result may be empirical, the process and result will be subjective. Especially given that sound is not something you see floating around in the vast vaccum of space. But that's art isn't it, expressing something in in a very subjective manner. In short searching for the least subjective is moot.
Now I'll say I actually like the random glitchy stuff. Did you ever pick up Stephen P. McGreevy Electronic Enigma: The VLF Recordings of Stephen P. McGreevy? It's a double CD of Earth Very Low Radio Frequency recordings. Really good stuff! It's random and glitchy like you say but in very listenable and enjoyable.
The Copernicus excerpt was pretty cool. I never read into that but it's pretty fascinating though it doesn't suprise me so much as I think that there is an art in the scences even though it may not be recognized as such. Like I always liked the fact that Ptolemey's system was wrong but, hey, it kind of worked and so you had this model that was false but, yet, it got people the information they needed - the subjective fantasy driving everyday reality.
anyhow very nifty post.
thanks
Oh and where are you and Justin registered?
i know i'm pushing the envelope here having not once mentioned any band or artist or anything remotely hip. if i'm invited back to guest post again, i promise to be less academic.
Please, forget the hip and keep blowing minds.
Since you started out accentuating what you would and would not capitalize, I became mesmerized with what you did and did not capitalize.
Thanks for all the great stuff to read and ponder.
Your idea of sonic representation of the physical reminds me of a machine to produce almost the opposite - the Harmonograph.
I would recommend reading the Dover books first since they are undoubtedly the cheapest.
well, i already have all these books - i went nuts on amazon about 6 years ago and they've been on my shelf since. but that's good to know about dover.
But that's art isn't it, expressing something in in a very subjective manner. In short searching for the least subjective is moot.
it's true that it's impossible to remove all subjectivity, but i don't agree that it's moot. i like the sport of the game - to keep stripping and stripping until the subjectivity is as minimal as possible. that way the art is closer to the physics.
and there's nothing wrong with random and glitchy, per se - it's just that when i look at our solar system, it is so organized and harmonic, i can't help but want to hear it.
I always liked the fact that Ptolemey's system was wrong but, hey, it kind of worked
i give talks about this! it not only "kind of worked" - it worked for more than a thousand years until copernicus and galileo fixed it. and all because ptolemy was able to communicate his ideas in written form and distribute them.
Oh and where are you and Justin registered?
hmm, i think he was in charge of that stuff.
a machine to produce almost the opposite - the Harmonograph.
oof - at the risk of sinking irretrievably into geekdom, wednesday, i built one of these in 8th grade for science fair. it was super cool. where by cool i mean fascinating, not actually cool.
it not only "kind of worked" - it worked for more than a thousand years
by "kind-of" didn't mean to diminish it's brilliance just that inspite of its empirical flaws it was very effective and useful.
Many years ago I was really into this stuff. Thanks for bringing it back to mind and with some nice added info.
One background bit I didn't notice you mentioning that might be interesting to some, if my memory serves me, is that the ancients actually thought that each body in space made a sound. Much the same way an arrow whistles through the air, so they thought planets must also whistle through space, each at its own pitch, based on size, speed and orbit. These pitches were thought to correspond to a harmonic scale that would theoretically match the one we have here on earth. did i get that right so far? Eventually astronomers figured out that the celestial bodies made no sound since sound doesnt travel in a vacuum. Although in theory they could still represent certain frequencies.
That being said, your project sounds super interesting to me, but i also have some subjects I would like to discuss with you. The first one being the "idea that truth and beauty are one and the same". This to me seems like a huge gamble. Mainly because I dont think you want to make beauty and objective quality, right? and although you can say that truth is also subjective, that just sort of undermines it's most lovable quality. So i'm sure you can think of plenty of ugly truths, and you must be able to find some fictional constructions beautiful. But maybe not. You are a scientist I gather and my experience is that scientists tend to often equate beauty and truth, and I'm not saying there is not something to be said for that equation, but i do find it a huge gamble.
(i've been sick for a few days and on some heavy remedies, my brain is all fuzzy, so excuse my ramblings)
great post. and no, there is no rule about writing about bands... see most of my posts for reference.
Also Claire, on the subject of communication with aliens, you should check out this.
Also of interest on that point is the gold record that was sent with voyager which actually contains music playable on a phonograph (here's hoping the aliens still have turntables).
Also the Arecibo Observatory in PR beamed a radio message to space in what appears to be Pong Language.
I hope any of this makes sense. did i already say great post. I loved it, I love stuff that is not about bands and hip things. Geek Aanaconda reporting for duty.
Oh and that Yuri Party? i'm so there. I'm dragging my Lebowski Fest fanatic and corndog eating contest winner friends to it, maybe i can also get my keytar building and playing friend to go.
I think the fact that the amount of entusiasm for this post is directly proportional to the amount of dope we smoked in university. :P
I think the fact that the amount of grammar Ramon can write correctly is directly proportional to the amount of dope he smoked today... hehe.
less grammar than flipping the sentence mid-stride and not copy editing.
"we smoked in university" seems to be a self-evident truth, at least from a grammarian's perspective.
Kind of along the line of what Carlos is saying, I've always been fascinated by the concept of all interstellar bodies having their own sounds. If you figure sound is the result of motion, then this must be true because all these bodies are moving through space. Now, that sound probably doesn't go much farther than their own mass or atmosphere (if they have one), but still...
I like the idea that I read about in some Indian musician's treatise, that the earth spinning produces a very low frequency sound, because (barring a vacuum) all sound is produced by motion, so all motion produces a sound on some level. Then we humans are born and raised on this planet, so that incredibly low frequency vibration that we don't even pick up on affects us completely. This is why the vast majority of Indian classical music is so heavily reliant on a drone. They believe that any drone will resonate in some sort of harmonic relationship with the earth's drone, which will then resonate inside each of us, as we're all resonating with the earth's drone ourselves.
wow, who knew you guys were all such geeks. i'm happy you will all soon be family. speaking of which, ubergeek justin has been so silent. maybe he didn't like the joke.
Hey Cherry, I was really struck by your post. You have some great ideas and I can't wait to see how you go about pursuing it. Before we started working on Brick table, Owen (the other half of the team) was taking a class here at CalArts with visiting professor Hans Koch (I believe), and they were doing sonification projects and the hardest part was making it useful. What we came to realize, and what is obvious you see too, is that no matter what, some kind of data is being appropriated to a choice that you as the artist/scientist have to make. So whether you create sounds for the data to manipulate, or use the data to control some sort of parameter, generating some sound out of the data, its hard to find a way to not have your own personal aesthetic in between the data and the end result. Maybe the only way to do this is to have some kind ambiguous noise representing the data...but then that wont (and this is not necessarily my own opinion) result in the harmonious output you are looking for...
If you are stuck with some sort of data that you really want to work with, but can't get highly musical (in a non abrasive kind of way) results from, think about this. Perhaps there is some other kind of data in the cosmos, something up there in space, related to what you are working with that, when paired together, gives you more consistently pleasing (I know, i know...thats subject to your own aesthetics/taste...) results.
That being said, here is one thing Owen and I have discovered while working on Brick table and developing and further developing (new stuff for Yuri's Night) Weather Report (the surface temperature front end to the table). For sonification (at least in our experience with this table) to be a meaningful and pleasing experience for the user, whether or not they really like the aesthetics of the sounds being generated and/or manipulated, they need find a way to personal connect with the data. Watching people play with Brick / weather report is interesting in that different people will do different things with it. Some people arbitrarily draw paths randomly and quickly around the map. Some people draw pictures, or write their names, or the names of their loved ones. Some people actually remember past road trips and draw out the path using that to spark other memories.
Perhaps because of the mere fact that we are thinking of the planets period, and are now in the mix of things, the harmonious structure within the planets that you and many are searching for also includes us. I don't want to sound like a hippie or very New Age and whatnot (im not dissing... so please don't be offended! hehe) but I think (and this is my personal opinion) that because we are looking at something, we are somewhat interfering-- that is not the right word, and I do not mean we are doing so in a disruptive way, but nonetheless, we now have a presence in the data set, even if that just means finding a way to interpret it.
What all this is really pointing at, and what I might have hinted or even said earlier is that perhaps finding the harmony really means finding that other data that might give the data you are trying to sonify a context. In Weather Report, the context is established by people looking at a map they have seen since they we small children and connecting to it in a personal way. Maybe your parents were in the military and you moved a lot and accordingly those places sound different when you journey to them on our table...perhaps that makes you remember and reconnect some things you may have forgotten about...etc.
The weather is a characteristic property of different places... I am from Chicago and it snows and rains there. I go to school in California and where it might be 65 degrees F here, it could be 30F in Chicago... It takes each place on our map and makes it unique.
Well, hopefully you have a little bit better understanding of our project as we are working on it, and most importantly, a more clear scope on your own. I hope I didn't just complicate things!
Thanks for posting the link to our video, we really appreciate people checking out our work, and please stop by (and this goes to all you out there too!) our installation at Yuri's Night-- the table will be there and so will Owen and I. There is always room at our table for you, so please come say hi!
Anyone is free to contact me off the board too if you have questions or want to talk about anything I just said, or our table, or anything really.
Keep up the great work!
Jordan
Brick Table
God am I dying to have the time to actually read this post in detail and all the links. On a surface scan it looks freakin' awesome and a very welcome perspective.
Good to hear your cyber-voice here. Off to work and waiting to hear if my cat is dying or not.
augh, i don't think i've ever come this close to falling in love with a blog post before. bad timing too, apparently.
you have so much to work with in this project. rhythm and tone are just different frequencies, different perceptual thresholds - it's all rhythm, in endless interaction and at infinite scale. i am convinced that in projects like this, music comes from pulling the interpretation from the superstructure of the data rather than simply moving the data around until we can perceive it. in other words, if i understand your goal correctly, maybe you can find the interpretation within the data instead of just arbitrarily assigning one. find the natural transform.
right now i have two projects on my mind; i don't know, your thinking stimulated me so maybe i can return the favor. first is a long-suffering sequencer built on the concept of rhythm i described above: a hierarchical sequencer of rhythm at infinite scale in either direction (though obviously there are practical limits on the listening end), with no enforcement of any particular data input format/UI. the second was inspired by the weather table when i saw it come across the "create digital music" blog on the 19th: GIS analysis of harmony in turbulence over topography for wind, watershed, or geomorphology.
anyway, thanks. your post made me happy! good luck!
jonathan, YES! the natural transform. i'm looking for the natural transforms from universe to music. they're right there in the data and in the physics, i can feel it.
ps jonathan, who are you and why aren't we best friends? please email me!
Thanks for that link Carlos, a couple years ago I stumbled upon the SETI site, but wasn't able to participate because my internet was ridiculously fucking slow... Uploading and downloading at sometimes 15kb per sec... That's not a lie... Jonathan who just commented can vouch for that as he was one of my neighbors there on the island. Nice to see you around Jonathan. Hope all is well.
Is there a company out there that sends out space trash capsules for common people like me? I could fill it with all kinds of retarded artifacts that I have collected... (my favorite item being a pygmy hippo ceramic piece and an empty Trojan warrior headed avon cologne bottle from the 60's) Are we still sending trash into outer space? Along with getting and naming my own star to go with the wolf pack my mother adopted for me... I'd also like to sign up for any program where poor people can cheaply skywalk from home... Time to watch Suspiria, because I truly have nothing to say. Carry on you masters of the universe.
yes, what claire says is true. i vouch. dial-up would have been competitive.
hi claire. i hope you're well too. which wolf pack did your mom adopt for you? if it's one of the yellowstone packs, there is an outside chance i might have a (lousy) picture for you. i just came back from a field class there; 10 days of wolf-watching with the experts and discussions with people on all sides of the management issues. great stuff.
cherry blossom... sadly, i have no idea where to email you. but here is my phonetic address: jey enn eee ell ess ohh enn at eee dee ess dot org. use it!
I've read this now, and wow. I'm tempted to say nothing and avoid demonstrating my relative and/or absolute ignorance, but I'm curious about the necessity of a natural transform into music. To me, it seems as arbitrary as converting the motion of the waves into olfactory data. Obviously, lots of really smart people have disagreed with me, and my beliefs about spirituality and architecture are probably as unlikely to everyone else. So if it's essentially an article of faith then cool, just curious.
I suppose the most reasonable answer is "read Kepler" but I think my brain would rebel. But I should show it who's boss.
The whole concept of data sonification reminds me I need to buy/read Edward Tufte's books. I'm trying to parse out the aesthetic vs. practical considerations in my head of when it would not just be aesthetically interesting but also pragmatically useful. I guess metal detectors leap immediately to mind as a place where data sonification works (although this may just demonstrate my complete ignorance of the concept of data sonification), but what I wonder is if this is an unexploited tool that could be used on a much larger scale. I suppose part of the problem is our lives are so full of audio already that adding more might be counterproductive. The examples on the Mars site didn't really do a lot to convince me it's an unexploited resource, although the weather table thing did a lot to convince me it's pretty cool from an aesthetic perspective.
Also, I'm disappointed that there's no Yuri's Party in Auckland. I'm tempted to throw a small screening of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (40th anniversary!) next Saturday and play Sun Ra records.
This was an awesome read, thank you for posting it.
I found the first chapter of this paper printed out on a job once, and it kind of blew my mind ...
MUSIC FOR MEASURE
or the parent topic: COLOUR MUSIC
dd, sonification is especially useful for tracking parallel events (continuous or momentary) which may have varying characteristics over time. at some point i came across a network traffic analyzer plugin for sonification. (i have no idea how useful that is.)
great connections with thresholds, architecture, tufte, and sun ra... sound is environmental.
Have you heard the sound eminating from the radio frequencies of the planet Saturn? I think I got it off the Nasa web page. They sound ghostly. So sound can exist in a vacuum per say.
Spock's chin.
Damn, Jonathan, you're super smart!!! I'm not trying to be a smart ass, but shit!! You and Cherry Blossom have blown me away. Why do I feel so stupid now? So petty in my thoughts.
enlightened beyond present abilities.
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