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When I was asked to make a proposal for a composition using the multi-speaker system of Orquesta del Chaos, my first thought was “why?”. I am a classically trained flutist, and part of my skill on my instrument involves using a given acoustic space in a way that the sound projects and uses the characteristics of the room as much as possible. Electronic amplification of a soft instrument like the flute usually entails boosting the volume of the sound, in a more or less natural way, or closely amplifying soft sounds in order to explore different instrumental timbres.
I have never felt the need to use a multi-speaker system, because my first reaction was that sound naturally propagates itself in a space, and that with the exception of using the technology to make the sound image travel through space in interesting ways, the fact of having many speakers didn’t suggest to me interesting possibilities that nature had not provided.
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However, not long after I was given the commission, I was listening to the weather report on the radio, and for the first time I noticed that the state of the sea, the “estat del mar”, was included in the weather forecast. “Marejol” struck me as such a beautiful word to name a certain waviness of the sea. I investigated a bit more, and found that scientists have developed an international table of categories to name the states of the sea, each European language no doubt making use of traditional names, and in keeping with the character of each language, sounding more or less poetic. The category names for “wind sea” in Italian, for example, sound like music notation.
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I recalled reading the news of an exceptionally giant wave (26,13 meters) that was measured off the coast of Santander during one of this winter’s major storms. The buoy belonging to the Instituto Español de Oceanografía (IEO) that made the measurement was actually broken from its mooring and carried away as far as San Sebastian. Scientists of the sea are constantly measuring the levels and movements of water, and that data is available online. The Coastal Monitoring Station of Barcelona, ICM-CSIC, maintains a system of a number of permanent devices continuously measuring different parameters of the coastal zone and systematic (monthly) surveys assessing environmental factors. This information is available as a series of daily photographs of a segment of the coastline, as well as numerical data and graphs. I have contacted the monitoring station and begun to investigate the possibility of establishing a real time stream of data.
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I am always interested in the intersection of nature and technology, our attempts to name what we observe in nature. In the context of sound, the contrast of the natural acoustic space of a room and a technologically controlled soundscape, I think that it would be very beautiful to use actual scientific data from measurements of the sea at a given moment to control the volume or movement of music through the mult-speaker system, translating one kind of natural movement or flux into another perception of movement, sound vibrations, music.
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www.barbaraheld.com
barbaraheld.wordpress.com
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Performance Setup
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Solo unamplified flute is played into a large resonant acoustic space, the Hall of the CCCB, but is also filtered by a process that converts a real time stream of data from the cameras and buoys of the Coastal Monitoring Station of Barcelona. Variables such as sea level and wave height can be converted into a process that controls the volume level, tuning or other musical parameters of the sound that is sent to each of the 8 speakers in the concert space. The changes in the amplified sound that is coming through the speakers will be totally unexpected and out of the direct control of the performer, who will have to adapt in an intuitively musical way to the “accompaniment” of the natural phenomena at some physical distance from the actual concert.
The rhythms of nature have always been a fundamental part of music, both symbolically and unconsciously. The relationship of the different times of day to certain emotional states, musical scales and intonation reached a high point in the ancient philosophical and musical tradition of India, but also continued in European classical music through the Middle Ages. Even in the orchestra of the time of Richard Wagner, instrumentalists still used slight nuances of intonation to express the ‘moods’ of each key or mode.
This process could also continue as a web page, with a link to the Coastal Monitoring Station, and an ongoing sound installation with my music that continues to interact with the observation data.
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Research
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International research projects for measuring oceanographic data are a high priority in the scientific community because of the urgency of global climatic change. There are many interesting projects using a sophisticated world-wide web of bouys that move with ocean currents and radio transmit information about water temperature, tides, rising sea levels and other variables, actually quite similar to weather balloons. Out of a huge amount of information that is readily available, I need to study the possibilities of using data that change quite slowly (except in the case of storms and phenomena such as giant waves) to be perceptible in the scale of “concert time”.
I am also in the phase of researching the technique of multi-speaker programming and acoustics, as well as artistic research into other ways of using technology, not only multi-speaker sound systems, but in other artistic disciplines. I am particularly interested in the work of an American artist named Spencer Finch, who uses a light meter to measure the exact color of the light at a special moment in time, whether on the observation deck at the Grand Canyon, or the fleeting change of light caused by a cloud passing in front of the sun. He then creates installations of common lightbulbs with colored filters that reproduce the exact hue of the light in the remembered moment.
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Links
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www.puertos.es
Centro Oceanográfico de Santander
Argo
US National Oceanographic Data Center ( NODC ).
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Programming
Multi-speaker system Connection to live data stream Interactive web page
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