Lars and Anna from Electrohype

A couple of days ago I had the great pleasure of meeting with Lars and Anna from Electrohype, the art organisation producing the most excellent biennale for contemporary art in this region mixing arts and technology. Electrohype celebrates their 10th year of existence in 2010. They have managed to produce five large exhibitions and build a fantastic network of international artists and competence within contemporary art.

In our conversations about physics, technology and the crafts and creative processes in the arts, it became clear how these are all integrated and drive each other in the development of human culture and innovation. The Electrohype exhibitions are great in revealing these connections and stimulating new ideas, no matter which kind of visitor you are.

Personally, I have been at two Electrohype exhibitions so far, 2004 at Malmö Konsthall and 2006 at Lund Konsthall.

A favorite work at the 2006 exhibition was Yunchul Kim’s “Hello World”. I’m going to describe my experience of this work a bit further here just to give you a idea what can be stumbled upon at Electrohypes exhibitions.

Electrohype exhibitions

My first impression is that Hello World is a aesthetically pleasing work of art, which is not always the case with contemporary installations where a lot of focus is put into the conceptual context. Its 246 metres of glossy copper pipe, twisted in some 2,5 meter straight lines up and down in the shape of a cuboid, express a kind of visalised mathematics. Such artifacts usually displays fascinating and beautiful forms.

When moving a bit closer towards this sculpture, one hears a quiet, pouring and shimmering sound emerging from the object. The sound of a digital flicker. Something which arouses one’s curiosity further.

You get something more than just the joyful impression in front of a funny machine. You get the feeling of a sympathetic robot, like R2D2 in Starwars perhaps. The artwork feels alive and seeks contact with me as a visitor.

There is a laptop and a small audio mixing console encapsulated in a glass box on the floor next to the sculpture. An audio cable transports the electrical signal of a sound from the computer up to a little black speaker attached to one of the corners where the 246 metre long copper pipe begins its extension in the room. Here the electric signal is transformed into acoustic audio signals finding its way further in the copper pipeline.

"Hello World" by Yunchul Kim

The audio flicker which is heard from inside the pipe is generated by two high frequency beeps sent out from the laptop. The combinations produced with this minimalistic musical material is actually a transformation of binary numbers in the laptop computer. Somebody who have happened to hear the noise of computer data stored onto cassette tapes (popular method during the eighties!) will understand how this artwork sounds like.

With the speed of sound (approximately 320 m/s) it takes about 0.8 seconds for the audio to travel from one side of the pipe to the other where a michrophone is attached. With the frequency that Yunchul Kim have selected for the oscillations in the audio flicker, he is able to transfer a memory capacity of about 1 kilobyte during these 0.8 seconds. Well outside the pipe again, the audio signal is electric moving through a cable back to the computer where the never-ending circulation continues in the next loop.

The data received is thus sent out once more, which expose the data to constant change due to wear and noise through the analogue part of the journey.

- “It is just how memories are changed. My friends face as I recall it, is an altered image – not a copy of is real face” says Yunchul Kim.

The little short message of text which the audio signal really represents, is constantly kept alive by being looped, a bit like how movie frames are repeated to give the illusion of temporal continuity.

The computer informaton also manifests itself in visual form, on a flat computer screen hanging on one side at the cuboid of pipes: “Hello World!”, the text flickers.

A Hello World code in C

For everyone who has ever struggled as a beginner with some introductory tutorial for teaching a computer programming language, this wording is legendary.

By managing to get some computer code printing out the letters “Hello World” on a display device, simple computer science principles or elements of a specific programming language can be explained to novice programmers.

Let us now leave the physical part of this installation in order to examine the more conceptual:

Yunchul Kim says that his artwork Hello World! is an analogue memory. Every piece of information (data) is coded syntactically and needs a body which can work as a medium och storage device. The media takes part in defining the meaning by dynamically initiate a process in the receiver (the visitor)  – A process which not always turns out to become what the sender originally intended.

Yunchul Kim is of Korean origin, living in Germany. The idea to this installation, he got when opening a letter sent from his mother in Korea.

- “I’ve been living in Germany for over eight years, and my mother use to send me rice cakes from home. But they manage to become too old and bad before they arrive. I live so far away from my mom, and it takes such a time for the cakes to get here. The process of decay gave me an idea. What happens if I let digital computer data travel far?”.

Yunchul Kim (1970) lives and work in Cologne. He studied musical composition at the Chugye University in Seoul, and later art studies at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne.

- Longer interview: “Music in the light of particle accelerators”

- Shorter interview “The atoms make their own music”

View of Turning Torso in the Øresund

I’m sitting in my studio, somewhere in Øresund, working on an update of the ESS film and will put new music to it. When playing around and composing a bit in Logic Studio, this trip hop theme emerged under my fingers while hearing the initial samples of my sonified protons, neutrons and electrons (audible in the background). I call it “Stories from the Sound” and in the near future you will hear it with the lyrics sung by one of my favourite singers.

Stories from the Sound (v.1)

Spectral analysis of the audio from the Table of Nuclides

Here is a little mix of the audio elements I’ve blogged about so far in my initial work to create some neutronica aesthetics.

Enjoy!

Neutronica Etude no 1

Decay of Potassium, Uranium and Thorium

Decay of Potassium, Uranium and Thorium in MetaSynth

After experimenting a while with musical representation of properties in physics, I found that one of the most obvious paths is of course to make music out of radioactive decay.

Radioactive decay describes energy emittance over time, which is exactly what music does as well (though the latter is more about emotional energies than matter).

Ionizing radiation is something natural. We all live in a radiating universe. The Earth, and all living things on it, are constantly bombarded by radiation from outside our solar system and the sun in our own. Most materials on Earth contain some radioactive atoms, even if in small quantities. We humans are radioactive carrying many radiactive elements in our body. Through the evolution our body have built its own system with a battery of enzymes constantly repairing chemical damage due to radiation.

The major radionuclides of concern for terrestrial radiation are potassium, uranium, and thorium. Each of these sources has been decreasing in activity since the birth of the Earth so that our present dose from potassium-40 is about ½ what it would have been at the dawn of life on Earth.

I have transformed into music the decay energy spectras from the metals Potassium (K-40),  Uranium (U-238) and Thorium (Th-232). Their respective curve of decay blends into a wonderful radioactive counterpoint when combined and tweaked a bit to fit into the scale of A minor harmonic. Here is the sounding result:

Radioactive Counterpoint

..and here is the spectral analysis audio version of these decays:

Radioactive Counterpoint (spectral version)

The Table of Nuclides

The Table of Nuclides imported into MetaSynth

The Table of Nuclides (or Chart of Nuclides) is a two-dimensional graph in which one axis represents the number of neutrons and the other represents the number of protons in an atomic nucleus.

Each point plotted on the graph thus represents the nuclide of a real or hypothetical chemical element. This system of ordering nuclides can offer a greater insight into the characteristics of isotopes than the better-known periodic table, which shows only elements instead of each of their isotopes (Isotopes are nuclides with the same number of protons but differing numbers of neutrons).

The line of black points in the middle represents stable elements. The nuclides in the colored areas above or below this line decay by neutron or proton emission. This happens in everything between 700 million years to instantaneously depending on the nuclides characteristics.

I have plotted the line of stable elements into the music software MetaSynth beginning with the most simple and lightweight element of Hydrogen, 1H, in the upper frequency register. Then we climb through the nuclides all the way down to the most heavy elements represented by lower frequencies.

This is how it sounds (click to play):

Table of Nuclides

..and this is a spectral version:

Nuclides Spectra

Mercury electrons

The 202Hg atom consists of 80 protons and 122 neutrons. To balance the charge of 80 protons this atom has a cloud of 80 electrons spinnig around its nucleus. Here is the sound of this electron cloud:

Electron cloud (Mercury)

All together, with the protons and neutrons in the nucleus, the 202Hg atom sounds like this:

Mercury atom

The four basic waveforms

Now it’s time to illustratre an atom in the world of music. We begin with the particles in the nucleus:

Weight or mass is something I usually paint musically with loudeness and pitch. Since the proton and neutron have about the same mass, I need to find some other musical parameter to differentiate them with. Why not use “timbre”.

A proton is a subatomic particle with a positive electric charge. Of the four basic waveforms, sine, square, triangle and saw, I represent it by a square wave.

The neutron has no electric charge; so to give it a dull, soft character, I let it be represented by a sine wave.

The electron has a negative charge making it suitable to be represented by the “acid squeaking” saw wave.

The quark structure of a proton

To give my protons and neutrons yet some more individual characteristics, I make use of the even smaller elements of matter they are built of: quarks.

While the proton is composed of three fundamental particles: one down quark and two up quarks, the neutron consists of one up quark and two down quarks. This gives us the patterns: [duu] and [udd]. Furthermore the down quarks are heavier than the up quarks which I represent by letting them play at different frequencies, one octave apart.

So here they are, the first sounds of a proton and a neutron. Click to play:

Proton spectra

Neutron spectra

The electrons are usually orbiting around the nucleus in a cloud-like appearance, which in my somewhat poetic interpretation sounds like this:

Electron cloud (Mercury)

However, my electron cloud is not completely a product of fantasy. I have arranged the shimmering eighty notes corresponding to eighty electrons in the mercury atom accordingly to to the six electron shells of this atom.

With these lines a former teacher of mine at the music conservatory in Gothenburg, Martin Nyström, opens his music review on Thomas Zehetmair’s recording of Niccolò Paganini’s “24 Capricci” in Dagens Nyheter, the high society Swedish morning paper.

I let my thoughts wander around a little while sitting here at my workplace surrounded by technological scientists and engineers whose interest and efforts to achieve perfection is a demand for the ESS to become successful. Scientifically and technically ESS are dealing with quantitative matters where the difference between precision and non-precision is often that of one and zero. Having crossed a couple of times in my career between faculties of engineering and nature sciences, and the faculties of arts, I have of course experienced the classical dichotomy between the two regarding culture of personalities and different attitudes towards the more “technical” side of life.

Niccolò Paganini

Martin Nyström praises Zehetmair’s new Paganini recording on the ECM label and means that it sets a new standard and is by far the most interesting recording compared to classical by Itzak Perlman (EMI) from 1972 (on Youtube!), and more recent James Ehnes (Onyx) and Tanja Becker-Bender (Hyperion).

There is one particular feature of Zehetmair’s playing that Martin Nystöm seems to enjoy the most: That he is shamelessly subjective in his interpretation. Something that Nyström himself also seems to prefer being when writing music reviews. And why not? Is it possible to be something else when the subject of a review is of qualitative matters like the arts?

Now to the virtuosic part: There was a lot of discussions about technical exercises and teaching methods during my years at the conservatory in Malmö in Sweden. Seven out of ten students in the piano class (including a revolter like myself) were taking private lessons outside the conservatory for the brilliant piano teacher Romuald Sztern -- A musical mastermind who used to coach our formidable Swedish piano virtuoso Per Tengstrand before his participation in grand international piano competitions (where Tengstrand always got to the finals if not winning the first prize).

Professors at conservatories are often a bit too musically noble, caring mostly about their own artistic interpretations rather than struggling with the more pedantic, tiresome “industrial floor job” that Mr. Sztern was doing: Standing by the side, carefully observing the artist at play; discover unsuitable habits, manners and unnecessary tensions; finding smart solutions to the problems and having the patience for repeatative training to bring about the virtuoso in the artist.

This way of having a “trainer” when you practice is the usual manner when it comes to sports, but not in music. Musicians try to live by the myths about the lonesome genius and masters like Paganini hiding away in some basement practising with the devil.. Playing music is an athletic activity. You have to master your mental discipline and exercise the various body parts that must coordinate when playing an instrument. Music shares a lot with sports regarding this. And musicians would have so much to learn and benefit from sports psychology and ergonomics if it weren’t for musicians being quite prejudiced when it comes to sports and afraid of stepping down, out of their clouds. The more you have the technical margins on your side, the more you can relax and start concentrating on making music!

The coach, the trainer doesn’t have to be a better athlete, or musician, than the artist he is training. But he will undoubtly always be the best observer when the artist is busy in action.

People often confuse virtuoso playing with fingers running fast. A virtuoso is somebody who possesses outstanding technical ability and perfection. This also includes, of course, the ability for musical expression no matter in what tempo or sound level. “The vituosic” can be seen as just a stylistic character being mastered fully. If it means playing punk music in an unpretentious manner with a guitar out of tune, people would still claim you for being virtuos if you did it really convincing.

Back to Nyström’s praising of Zehetmair’s virtuoso playing -- Personally I regard Maxim Vengerov as being the most outstanding violinist of our time! You can compare them both here below and watch some virtuoso playing and technical seminar with Per Tengstrand, Romuald Sztern and Håvard Gimse:

Thomas Zehetmair performing violin Sonata No. 3 ‘Ballade’ by Eugène Ysaÿe:

Maxim Vengerov performing violin Sonata No. 3 ‘Ballade’ by Eugène Ysaÿe:

Duo Tengstrand-Sun performing ‘The Ride of the Cossacks’ by Franz Waxman:

Seminar on piano technique with Romuald Sztern, Per Tengstrand and Håvard Gimse:

On the 15th of September 2009 I had the pleasure of giving a short “stand up science” talk at the Q-day event in Lund, Sweden. I prepared myself to deliver a most flipped-out presentation, but the competition for that was pretty hard when being squeezed in among main speakers like the Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, the parapsychologist Susan Blackmore, the world famous artist Spencer Tunick, the founder of Atari and the gaming industry Nolan Bushnell and Kristofer Lundström from the Swedish national TV being the conference moderator.

Q-day was the opening day of the European Innovation Conference (Innovation in Mind) this year and gathered a large audience. Q – Signs of tomorrow was started in Lund, a city largely characterized by vivid contacts and interplay between the largest university in Scandinavia, innovative corporations and an exciting cultural scene. In Lund, there is a thousand-year-old tradition of innovation and the creative interchange of ideas.

Q-day is an arena  for cross-border meetings between people who share curiosity and a burning interest in the future. Q-day takes as its point of departure the fact that new and exciting things tend to start, not in the centre, but in the periphery, in the points of intersection between different ways of thinking, different backgrounds different types of knowledge, cultures and ideas.

Being a musician and composer myself, now working as a communications officer within corporate identity and new media at the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, I took this opportunity to promote the future ESS materials science center and our recently launched neutron music project. Enjoy this video and prepare for some wild connections, moving from the world of music over to the pictoral arts, ending in the domain of accelerators and particle physics!

Neutron hologram of a lead crystal. The spots represent the positions of 12 lead atoms forming the first neighbors of a cadmium nucleus, as displayed on a sphere of radius .35 nm.

Welcome to this cozy little place of fuzzy logic and other things that might provoke the world of civil engineers and scientists where I now have so many wonderful friends and colleagues. What is Neutronica? Could it be the noise between the neutrons, the acoustic music of microcosmos (yes, Bela Bartok..), “new electronica” or just playing with arts and science in various ways? Neutronica will among other things generate a soundtrack for ESS that the audience will be able to hear at the premiere of our planned Neutron Music Festival under the direction of the famous trumpet player Håkan Hardenberger.

You should contribute! There is a whole world of creative musicians, composers and artists among the researchers and scientists that will benefit from the ESS. Coming from the school of arts, I also know a lot of artists who dig nature science and other existential triggers that seeks the answer to our lives. You are all welcome to contribute with material to this blog and to develop the concept and artform of Neutronica.

Personally, what attracts me to the arts is what attracts me to science: Innovation, the imaginative play and curiosity to find new dimensions, solutions to problems, or just having fun. I believe art and fuzzy logic is the birth of science.

In other words,
the aim of Neutronica and this blog is to explore and express the meaning of life!

Let’s begin..