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.)