The ‘Music of Sound’ was a 1 day symposium and hack on sonification organised by the University of Oxford e-Research Centre and the Centre for Digital Scholarship.
The theme of the day was sonification, a topic that is inherently interdisciplinary, ranging from digital humanities and data science to sound synthesis, composition and performance. It attracted visitors from all over the country and all around the disciplinary landscape, including several composers and sound artists. You can read the Oxford e-Research Centre news item here.
The FAST project featured in two of the talks, which built on our earlier ‘Numbers into Notes’ work .
David De Roure presenting ‘The Timid Cybergoat: A Reprise’ (courtesy Iain Emsley)
Professor De Roure, the FAST IMPACt PI from the Oxford e-Research Centre, presented an update of a short work from 2000 of hypertext fiction based on the traditional (Norwegian) ‘Three Billygoats Gruff’ fairy tale, with sonification of the hyperstructure: given a choice of paths through the story, the reader could listen to an algorithmically generated rendering of the structure beyond each hypertext link. The work later featured in the 2002 conference paper ‘On hyperstructure and musical structure’ and the 2005 workshop paper ‘The Sonification of Hyperstructure‘. Professor De Roure presented a refresh of the work, 17 years on, using contemporary technologies.
Alan Chamberlain presenting ‘Between chaos and control’
The second talk was presented by the FAST partner from Nottingham, Dr. Alan Chamberlain, and Dafydd Roberts with the title “Between chaos and control: compositional & computational approaches to alchemy inspired sonification”. Chamberlain/Roberts’s work in progress charts compositional and computational approaches to “complex mapping paradigms of [alchemical] data to musical parameters”. Dr. Chamberlain is also a Visiting Academic at the University of Oxford. Below are two compositions that were played at the Symposium and form part of Dr Chamberlain’s research:
Howitzvej Sunset Generative
https://soundcloud.com/alain_du_norde/howitzvej-sunset-generative