S for Sonification

producing sound, the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data.

dictionary
Dictionary of Nonsense, Goethe-Insitut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi

Thinking about sound as a medium to carry data about the present environmental crises. What are the ways in which we can respond to so much accumulated data on the environment. How do we explore the tensions of sound and data? How do we experience it?

The ode of murder 2:35: The majority of the sound is derived from the songs of humpback whales during their migration along the coast of Australia. Whales have an extensive repertoire of songs vocalization and grammar. This syntax can change within a single species according to geography, and behavior. Often these whales that speak different l anguages attack one another as hostiles when placed in captivity; based on the inability to understand each other. Humpback whales spend the first years of their life developing their individual song which once found will be their signature or their name which the sing as their trademark song for the rest of their lives. The soundscape also includes sounds of a harpoon and the engine of a whaling vessel. The narrative tries to juxtapose the sounds of murder and pain from that of peace and communication. The chopped up and reassembled parts of the melody signify the humans’ belief in sole appropriation of ‘language’. This is to highlight the ways we deconstruct and limit our ability to even recognize that other beings can communicate in ways, which is beyond our realm of understanding; beyond ‘words’. We are fundamentally unable to break away from our limited reality, and accept that other complex system can function beyond our purview, control and belief systems, if this is not ignorance what is?

Whales represent sonification at its rawest form. The way melody has a role in their life, the use of pitch and tone to express. Thus to use the melody and phraseology was an essential part of the interpretation. Murder has a special significance when it happens to something that voices its feelings vocally, voice its pain and anger and makes the water vibrate with its emotion for kilometers around. Thus sonification begins and ends with where it is voiced from the story and music of the whale embodies that. How each tone, each sound quality can take us in a direction, can represent a completely different image. Thus in this I explored how notes strung together have a coherency and how notes spliced from a story can portray a completely different feeling state in their isolation.

Silence and strife 3:17: This piece begins with creating a soundscape from the forests of northern Kerala in Wayanad. The sounds have been assembled from numerous recording of crickets, katydid, dozens of tree frogs and other calls during nights in the monsoon. The melodious call in the higher register is a Malabar whistling thrush known for its painfully sweet and pure call that finds its way through mist fog and rain to grace the land. The lower register call is a brown fish owl, the keeper of the streams and the riparian ancients, who makes sure we behave well in its sanctum. Other sounds found in the soundscape include chainsaws, forests fires, trees falling, and dissonant swathes of sound from the keyboard. This scape wishes to somatically portray the emptiness and loss of the life in the desolation of a land. The silent screams that we never acknowledge, for the simple fact that we are unable to listen.

Another element of interpreting sonification is the assembling of sounds on top of each other to night a story, how different pockets can coalesce to create an experience larger than the sum of the aggregates. Thus this scape focuses not on where sound is produced but more on how these distinct characters interplay and the role of the listener in the face of a small world. A play of a surrounding that is both dynamic in its conversation and visceral in its intimacy. By assembling this world one is assembling a story, making the individual parts as one bound environment.

Time hoax 24sec:

Every sec is a representative of an hour; thus the clip is the day in the life of the earth. In this sonification is taken as its most technical representation, the portrayal of data through sound.

For this piece the rate of destruction of different parts of the ecocide was taken and represented them as beats per second as a rhythmical equation.

These rates include:

Number of elephants killed every hour: 1.2

Number of species extinct every hour: 415

Number of acres of forest every second: 4

Amount of glaciers disappearing in Alaska every hour: 0.2km3

Each has a distinctive sound and tempo and together they form the composition of what living in today’s world looks like for so many.

The scape hopes to touch on the insanity of time and its pace, and the profound fear and loneliness we face knowing that the world is filled with nothing but our emptiness and folly.

Music and text by Madhavan A P