Archive for October 5th, 2007
Straining Towards A Dubjective Geophonics
Arvid Tomayko-Peters makes music, which he calls geophonic, from time series data, producing tonal pieces that can be manipulated by the listener and played any which way — faster, slower, backwards and forwards. His main work to date is an installation that plays geological data relating to climate changes over 5.3 million years. What’s more, he’s created sequencing software called Maestro Frankenstein that’s intended to enable others to produce similar results from other time series data. As he says: “Although designed with geologic data in mind, Maestro Frankenstein creates a score from any timeseries data and plays it back in realtime with any instrument (MIDI, VST or built-in synth) that you specify.”
Gough map of East Anglia, c.1360, from Foxearth.org.uk
I’m trying to get my hands on time series data sets relating to regional socioeconomics in the UK, specifically the eastern counties, that I could work on and make music from. It’s early days yet, but I’ve got it in my mind to produce a tonal representation of retail, transport and certain geophysical data as part of my attempt to map in intrapersonal detail my journey out of the eastern counties. Any links to and hints about relevant material gratefully received.
Clearly, there are problems with using empirical socioeconomic data in versioning the people, not least of which is its pre-determined structuration of the archive. I’m with Doreen Massey and Benjamin Keith Belton in regarding the archive as simultaneous space/flow rather than a series of knowledge paths — no matter how local or how deeply trodden.
Posted by Neil
on October 5, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Tags: Eastern counties, Ecology, Music, Proletarian Postmodernism, Regionalism, Sound, Spatiality, antiquarianism, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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