AES UK, Cambridge Section presents “Music from nature and science: melodies, rhythms, harmonies from the world around and inside us”, with Domenico Vicinanza
Abstract:
Music is a wonderfully organised and rich language and, since Renaissance, relations between science, sound and melodies have been explored by several composers in different ways. We can think about Bach or Mozart in the XVII and XVIII centuries and their experiments with symmetry and cycles or, later, Webern and Schoenberg in XIX and XX centuries with their attempt to map series and numbers to melodies. The vibration of a complex mechanical system, the oscillations of hormone levels in a biological system, the electromagnetic waves captured by a spacecraft outside our solar system, can become melodies, rhythms and harmonic structures, offering a new insight into the microscopic and the extremely large. The talk will cover how mapping physics parameters to aural properties (sonification) can provide us with new tools to explore science, connect with nature and appreciate music.
Short bio:
Dr Domenico Vicinanza is music composer (film scoring and orchestration) and a theoretical physicist, and he is a Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and Arts and Humanities Coordinator at GÉANT, the European backbone for research and education. Always fascinated by how music and science are a continuous quest for harmony, he has been one of the pioneers of large-scale data sonification for artistic purposes.
Sonification is a process that turns information into sounds, giving voice to invisible relations and inaudible fluctuations and vibrations, microscopic regular patterns, chaotic behaviours. Using sonification, music can then become a way to describe and experience data structures and physical properties, creating music not just inspired by science, but truly driven and designed by it, transforming art into a unique tool to communicate science and innovate perception. In the past twenty years, Dr Vicinanza has worked nationally and internationally as an art, science and technology ambassador, promoting the role of music to get people closer to science. He worked with NASA on outreach programs, organising since 2013 music performances based on spacecraft data, radio telescopes, satellites.
His latest work is a series of flute pieces based on the sonification of Mars weather released in Nov 2020, downloadable as phone ringtones. He received commissions for chamber and symphonic music for CERN, working on a for its 60th Anniversary (conducted by V. Ashkenazi), the 30th Anniversary of the Web, and he designed interactive art installations based on CERN superconducting magnets.
