Noise for Airports

Data Frenzy at Sanders Theatre

Last night, I had the pleasure of being at the North American premiere of Japanese noise/data artist Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics [ver. 2.0]. The “performance” was really more of a film: the audience watched a large, high-resolution projection of data, while listening to Ikeda’s signature electronically-produced sounds. (To complicate things a bit, the web page for datamatics says that “Ikeda employs real–time programme computations and data scanning” to produce at least some of the visuals,” so it’s not entirely like a film, I guess.) Ikeda was nowhere to be seen, unless you were one of the few people who realized that he was actually the quiet Japanese man by the projectors.

Ikeda’s work thrills at the edges of the sensorium, massing individual sounds until they blur into a mass, playing frequencies at the upper limit of human hearing, and running data across the screen at an ever-quickening, rapidly illegible pace. Warnings were posted at the door about strobe effects and loud volumes (woe to the accidental epileptic who encounters Ikeda’s work unaware), although neither were to be found in unusual amounts for an audience familiar with rock concerts. (My one complaint, and a small one, is that there was not enough volume; Ikeda’s work in bass registers is phenomenal, and the speaker system just wasn’t enough to rattle the audience. I heard that this was perhaps a concession to the fragility of the stained glass windows in the theater—understandable, but a pity.)

The work went through several “movements,” for lack of a better word, revolving (sometimes literally) around the stars, the genome, and then the show itself. This shifting in scale, from the microscopic to the macroscopic and referential to self-reflective, was a central concern, as was the palpably physical effect of such a data deluge. Having gone to the show with a synthetic biologist, I can report that at least one scientist enjoyed the implicit commentary about the incredible mass of modern scientific data, and the effect that these data have on perception. Ikeda may race through the genome in a matter of minutes, but even with years it stretches the limits of comprehension.

Of particular interest was the venue’s role in the history of modern data, and the invention of the science of acoustics. As Emily Thompson describes in her book, The Soundscape of Modernity, Sanders Theatre was considered “acoustically superb” and the president of Harvard wanted to identify what made it that way. Physicist Wallace Sabine was tasked with quantifying its acoustic properties, and he undertook extensive experimentation to measure reverberation.

Sabine amassed a great deal of data, and obsessed with the precision and accuracy of his measurements, “once threw out over three thousand measurements, representing several months’ work, after determining that the clothing worn by the observer (himself) had a small but measurable effect upon the outcome of his experiments” (Thompson 36). Seemingly overwhelmed by his data, Sabine had a difficult time determining how the properties of a room affected reverberation, until one day, he figured it out:

I was floundering in a confusion of observations and results which last night resolved themselves in the clearest manner. You may be interested to know that the curve, in which the duration of the residual sound is plotted against the absorbing material, is a rectangular hyperbola with displaced origin. […] This opens up a wide field. (Thompson 39)

Sabine’s organ pipe sounded data out of Sanders Theatre at the turn of the 20th century, bringing the former art of acoustics closer to science—the “confusion of observations” to the “clearest manner” of equations. Ikeda’s datamatics, at the start of the 21st century, condenses enormous masses of data back into confusion, toying with the clarity and discreteness of data and bringing it closer to art.

(You can watch a lecture by Emily Thompson on her book here.)

Machines to Interpret for Them

I’m reading Inventing Entertainment, an enthusiast’s history of the player piano, and while it is generally light reading (most interesting for anecdotes), I’m occasionally finding really provocative stuff in it. One such passage, an excerpt from Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice:

“By chance,” explains the main character, Peter Hogarth, an eminent mathematician, “a program tape for a digital computer might also fit into a player piano, and although the program has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with music—it might refer to some fifth-order equation—nevertheless, when it is put in the machine, it produces notes. And it might also happen that not all the notes thus produced will be in total chaos, but that here and there one will hear a musical phrase.”

The book is about scientists trying to decipher messages from outer space—to convert them from one form of encoding to another that we can understand. This passage is a great literal example of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication.

In Hall’s model, messages are always encoded by the sender and decoded by the recipient. This encoding and decoding can be sociocultural (like in-group language, or based on common cultural references), and that is Hall’s main focus, but the model also works for technological encoding and decoding. What Hogarth describes in the passage above is the co-dependence of data and decoder for meaning making. The punch card on its own does not mean anything; only in conjunction with the computer does it mean mathematically. In conjunction with the player piano, these holes could signify music.

This idea is actually carried out in Yasunao Tone’s Musica Iconologos. The album is based on two Chinese poems. Digital images of the poem’s ideograms (or perhaps of photos representing the ideograms, I’m still unclear on that) are the equivalent of Hogarth’s computer tape. These binary files, instead of being read to create images, are read as audio data in a different computer program. Through what Hall might call an “oppositional reading,” data encoded for one purpose is decoded for another, creating a screechy, noisy, Fluxus-y composition.

(That’s an embedded Flash player with an excerpt, for you RSSers and Tumblr dashboarders.)

In spite of Tone’s avowed interest in indeterminacy (he was loath to make recordings, since they are so repeatable—this data composition was a way to remove intentionality), the liner notes for Musica Iconologos reveal the human hand that intervened in this otherwise pure replacement of decoding processes:

The sound files produced were very short in duration, averaging out around 20 milliseconds in length. […] My task as the digital editor and sound designer was to uncover and shape the larger sounds that lay within each short 20 ms burst.  I accomplished this by expanding the sound to a length that best fit the meaning of the word or picture the sound represented.  Then, if necessary, I digitally mixed or merged several projections together to achieve a desired grouping of data, following the structure (word groupings) of the poem and the implicit meaning of the particular word or picture in question.  Also, where appropriate, digital pitch shifting was applied to certain sounds in order to reflect the phonetic implications of the spoken Chinese word.  It should be noted that there was never any exclusion or repeated inclusion of sounds based on their final result.  To his credit, Tone always remained true to the poem’s structure regardless of his personal impressions of the music, and in a sense the sounds were a type of “chance operation” in form, as their final organization was established long before the project began production.

That quotation is from the sound designer for the album, Craig Kendall. Because the sounds produced by a clean swap of decoding software were too short, he had to lengthen them. Beyond that, and quite surprising to me, is the discussion of how pitch and structure was altered for artistic effect. It is rather telling, I think, how apologetic he becomes at the end of this passage, trying to recover the idea that something with so much human judgment can remain a “chance operation.” (Of course, even things that seem more obviously to be chance operations are never really devoid of human influence.)

I’m always looking for more examples of this kind of data music, so if you know of anything cool, drop me a line!