For Dark Matter Day, October 31, the final day of my fellowship at CERN, I performed a live improvised sonification / spatialisation of data I have collected from various parts of the LHC accelerator and CMS detector, on the 8 channel “CMS soundsystem”, set up literally right above the detector itself. It was quite an event, to say the least!
In a way, this event was the culmination and final manifestation of 2 months of my activities at CERN. I created a composition which was a journey through CERN, both my personal journey, and alsoa journey traversing scales of space, time and energy, starting with the macroscopic and ending up in a very different world… this is the journey of the protons as they go from the start of the accelerator complex, through the various accelerators and finally collide in the CMS detector to create exotic subatomic entities, resonances that exist for billionths of a second at trillions of electron volts of energy. But what do all these extreme sounding numbers and scales mean, and to frame it in an expressive way, what might it feel like, what might it sound like?
This was my final challenge! And being “Dark Matter Day”, curiously celebrated on Halloween, it had to have a dark matter spin on it (and it was a dark and very foggy day & night). Luckily, years ago I collaborated with CERN scientist Wolfgang Adam on sonifying the “missing energy” in the CMS detector, which could possibly be dark matter, so this was to be the culminating part of my live composition. The event began with a very engaging discussion I had with a dark matter physicist who works at CMS, Roberto Salerno. However, ironically the best conversation was not recorded, which is often the way, a kind of media “observer effect”, so when the camera was on me I suddenly sounded quite blithe, referring to the experiment as “those things you do” (instead of our unrecorded banter about baryonic acoustic oscillations, acknowledging Vera Rubin, the unsung dark matter pioneer, and me challenging the Standard Model of physics with Modified Newtonian Dynamics and such radical counterparadigmatics!)
I then presented a “sonic taxonomy” of the different sounds and data I had gathered, giving the live (and online) audience a bit of a lexicon or language to maybe help them understand the journey we were about to undertake. And then, when it was time to (literally) flick the switch and turn on my “analog laptop”, I threw my compositional notes / score out the window (see pic below (in fact when I showed the CMS chair my composition, their jaw literally dropped open in horror). Instead, I went full dark, waves of noise, volume at 11, and it was “something else”… It should be noted that it was all improvised and 100% analog, with no sequencing or “normal” samples, except for the sonified data as modulation input – in this way I wanted the experiments – the machines, the detectors – to play the synthesizers (with a bit of subjective tuning on my part just to help find the harmonics:)
I don’t know how the audience felt, but after the first few minutes they had all backed away! The “future field” magnet (see this post) really resonated the system in a way that I had never seen / heard before. At the end someone asked me if I would be able to repeat the same thing, and I said not at all – it was a unique experiment. But after, one person after said to me that it was unlike anything they’d ever experienced before, so it must have worked, at least for some!
Click here to watch the full video (with interview):
https://www.youtube.com/live/SZKxZPKFMDY?feature=shared
Click here for the performance:
https://www.youtube.com/live/SZKxZPKFMDY?feature=shared&t=1774