Music Is In Everything: Part II

Music Is In Everything: Part II

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

“Music is in everything”: using sound to present (and perform) data

(Scroll down for video of the performance.)

As a follow-up to my previous post on sound-figures, here’s a presentation I gave at the Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP) 2013 Summer Seminar at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.

The presentation ended with a performance of a sound-figure. Scott LaHart, David Woodhouse, and I (aka Avida Dong) interpreted the same sound-figure I presented in the talk, the one produced using sine waves. Only this time, we made some different choices, at least in terms of timbre. Instead of computer-generated sine waves, we used 20-mm-diameter open polyethylene tubes with balloon mouthpieces to create the sound. The pipes were cut so that, when blown using the balloons, their fundamental resonant frequencies were the same as, or similar to (at least in theory), those used in the sine-wave sound-figure. The lengths of the pipes were determined using the approximation L = v / (2 * f0), where L is the length of the pipe (in meters), v is the velocity of sound in air (in meters per second), and f0 is the fundamental frequency (in Hertz). The longer the pipe, the shorter or lower the resonant frequency, and each frequency was color-coded with different balloons.

Here’s a picture of the performance (taken by Tengel Aas Sandtrø):

Here’s a video of the performance (c. 2 mins), recorded on a mobile phone (by Hana Smiskova-Gustafsson):

And here’s a sound file (c. 32 mins) of the entire presentation (recorded by Shane Colvin):

Note on the banner image accompanying this entry: sine wave (downloaded June 12, 2013, from Boundless)