Alien Music

A Didgeridoo and The Beleboke

[All about The Beleboke...]

The didgeridoo is an instrument from the aboriginal cultures in Australia.  The didgeridoo is a hollow piece of wood, and when air is blown into one end, a rich low drone comes out the other. The wood is eucalyptus, whose leaves are favored by the koala:  hollowed out by the action of termites, the didgeridoo is a found object from the landscape.

There are no finger holes, no mechanism to change pitch.  The didgeridoo sounds at a fundamental based on the column of air vibrating in the wood.  The players lips are placed entirely within the didgeridoo opening and then rapidly fluttered.  This quick alternating of wind pressure, combined with the inconsistencies and uneven surface left by the insects inside the wood cause a buzzy complex sound, full of overtones and shifting frequencies.

A few years ago I grew out a beard.  I've grown beards on and off, usually for the winter months and then clean for the rest of the year.  Now I have a permanent beard, and in preparation for The Beleboke work, I had to start practicing didgeridoo playing again.  I have found it very difficult to make the seal between my lips and the wood -  I think a re-application of beeswax around the edge may help.

Compare to the sound of a flute.  The inside of a flute is perfectly smooth, and the wind pressure is a consistent smooth flow from over a constructed mouthpiece.  Flautists can over-blow their instrument and create noisy effects, but the default setting on a modern flute (or a medieval recorder) is a sine wave.

Changes to the shape of the lips, jaw and even the position of the tongue inside the mouth will all serve to change to mix of partials coming out of the didgeridoo.  These changes - roughly equivalent to moving between different vowel sounds - can be combined to generate powerful rhythmic inventions.  Skilled players can also add vocalisation from deep in their throats.  Tuned correctly, this will create a beating pattern between the voice and the fundamental of the didgeridoo. An occasional yelp or gargle can imitate animal calls. 

If the player is able to maintain sufficient pressure from reserve air stored in the cheeks, then a quick inhale can be stolen through the nose without disrupting the ongoing drone.  This is called circular breathing, and is one of the challenges faced by my beard.  It is inconceivable that I will shave just for this piece, even if it means slathering my beard with brylcream. 

So the didgeridoo is a naturally occurring sonic device that is activated by the most straightforward of human gestures.  The resulting shifts in harmonics and the gradual undulation of the drone seem nature-bound to capture the recurring patterns of metabolism.  Breath, heartbeat, circulation.  Perhaps neural synapses firing. 

Stories tell how the world was created by songs.  Sound precipitated matter from dreamtime.  When the didgeridoo plays, creation reverberates with the essential forms of vibration.  Sonicism   posits in the second point that "Sound represents the interstice of physiology and cosmology".  The didgeridoo creates a vortex, overlays mythology and activates the human body in this interstitial environment.  This is why it is the perfect instrument for The Beleboke, where we are asked to interact with the electromagnetic frequency spectrum typically outside out immediate sense perception.

In the song "Tie Me Kangaroo Down", Rolf Harris sings about a dying Australian farmer.  the song begins with a list of instructions for the care and feeding of his livestock.  For example:

"watch me wallabies feed, mate "
"take me koalas back, Jack"
"mind me platypus duck, Bill"

and of course ... "tie me kangaroo down, sport".  His final instructions touch on the impact of the didgeridoo. 

 "Play your didgeridoo, Blue
Play your didgeridoo.
Oh like keep playing till I shoot through, Blue
Play Your didgeridoo"

This shamanic figure, Blue, can use the didgeridoo to help the spirit of his friend break free from the collapsing energies of the dying physical body. He will shoot through, perhaps breaking the veils between relative and absolute, discovering with his final breath a view of reality that shows no distinction between dreamtime and the current moment.  The didgeridoo is a tool to support consciousness in the preliminary bardo.  Without the support of the body, confusion can overwhelm the nascent consciousness (see  the final stanza, "...so we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde..and that's it hanging on the shed" ), and the resonant frequencies of the instrument provide a final memory of metabolic structure. 

I don't want to read too much in to this song.  On the wiki page where you can find all the lyrics, Rolf Harris says that he actually didn't know what a didgeridoo was when he wrote the song.  But then, not knowing never prevented me from moving ahead with an idea either (for example, see my admixture of 'bardo' and 'dreamtime' in previous paragraph).

So:  the didgeridoo is an extension of the human form, a highly charged artefact from dreamtime with mythic resonance for the creation of timespace.  As such, it is ideal for The Beleboke, where the drone will sound in counterpoint to the electromagnetic structures generated in the Earths atmosphere.


counterpoint for atmosphere and didgeridoo

The earth's atmosphere is alive with electromagnetic activity at the low end of the radio spectrum,  Most comes from lightening storms across the globe, although some of the most beautiful forms are generated by the interaction of solar winds with the magnetosphere.

I say "beautiful" forms, because with a Very Low Frequency (VLF) receiver, you can pick up this electromagnetic activity and reproduce an equivalent sound.  Check out the NASA page for streaming 'sferics'  .  The available sounds are like bird song, animal calls or deep breathing.   With some pretty good electronics skills, I could make a receiver myself.  With passable skills, I could probably put together one of the available kits.  Since I have neither, I'm deeply grateful to Steve McGreevey and his website Auroral Chorus.  In addition to providing a great introduction to the subject, the site also includes many examples from his own field recordings.  And most important, he sells completed and tested VLF receivers.  One of which I have on order.

I'm going to start working out a piece that I first started thinking about over 5 years ago.  Called Voices of the Noosphere, it is a piece for radio telescope and didgeridoo.  The idea was that the telescope would be receiving electromagnetic signals from a pulsar.  That pulsar signal would be represented in sound.  I had a patch written in the cSound software language that would apply the envelope of my didgeridoo playing to the 'sound' of the pulsar.  I'd throw in some optional granular synthesis processing for aesthetic effect, and then re-broadcast the signal out to the stars.

If I remember right, the very first impulse for this came as part of a discussion of SETI message construction with Doug Vakoch.  We'd met at a SETI workshop, and started to write down a proposed structure for an outbound message, one that attempted to encode notions of 'creativity'.  We did this by presenting material that was shaped by the fibonacci series.  Rhythmic bursts of radio at specific frequencies, harmonic relationships across the radio spectrum:  all governed by the Fibonacci series.

The idea was that a receiving culture would identify the underlying series, and then would recognize that other parts of the message manipulated this underlying pattern.  A natural source - like a pulsar - could create a repeating pattern, but it is highly unlikely that a natural source would move through the first 5 numbers of a Fibonacci sequence, and then retrograde that pattern.

I thought that a larger piece could be done using an identifiable radio source - like a pulsar.  The electronically manipulated sound along with my didgeridoo would provide a couple layers of counterpoint.  A receiving culture could identify the pulsar, and then ask themselves what on earth that other material represented.  I like the didgeridoo for this because of all instruments, it seems to create music with a period about as long as a human breath, with overtones that seem to resonate with the human heartbeat. 

Another element of the piece was that this same material would be meaningful for a human audience, listening to the sonic representation of it all.  The sound becomes an interstitial space, a place where the biological necessity of sense perception overlaps with a representation of the larger electromagnetic form of the universe.  This is a privileged location, one that is liturgical, poetic, alchemical.

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of this piece, for something that has never been realised.  With the VLF receiver, I'm going to start working out the details, and creating the alchemical conjunction.  I may not (yet) be working with pulsars, but I will be interacting with the electromagnetic spectrum in a meaningful manner.

 


Returning to the Blog

Pacific Garbage
I've had material on the zenglop.typepad.com domain for many years.  I used it originally as a repository for longer form essays like my UNESCO keynote, some program notes, or an early iteration of Voices of the Noosphere.  No traffic, unless I pointed someone to a specific article.  I didn't get and still struggle with the idea that a blog is an emerging entity, comprised of many smaller unfinished ideas.  I say something today that I correct tomorrow and tangentially refer to the third day, leading to a critical mass of material at some future point.  Like a coral reef.  Or the Pacific Garbage Vortex

At the same time, my notebooks filled with just those kind of partial thoughts.  A few months ago, I determined to write every day, 500 words or so.  I won't say it was to "have fun" but I do know that the act of writing is a pleasurable one for me.  It is an immersion in a strange place, a place that is both inside my psyche and not  - a sensation that is in the room with me and also somewhere in my body.  Spending an hour or so each morning is like taking a bath in salt water, sloughing off a layer of skin while floating in a crystal suspension.

My focus was vague but around the ideas of noise, physiology, creativity, memory.  A unified experience of sound and meaning.  Liturgical constructs of abstract sound.  Developing an aesthetic appropriate to off-earth or extra-terrestrial conditions.

Questions about what is noise led to a discussion of randomness and complexity.  Memory has taken me to a reading of Henri Bergson "Matter and Memory".  Writing a finished book seems further away than ever as my reading list grows before me.

Today, I've been away from blogging for 2 months, which is almost as long as I had been disciplined in puttingh out daily updates.  We travelled to England for a vacation, and it looks like while the Noise book is percolating in the library, a rhapsodic memoir of East Anglia is emerging.  After England, we were home for a few weeks then off again to Pennsic - an event which always inspires me to practice hurdy gurdy.  So maybe some occasional blogs to come on that instrument.

Tomorrow, I'll post the start of a builder log for the realisation of Voices of the Noosphere.  The date on that first post is 2005.  It's now 2012, and I'm at least 13 years older than I was back then.  So I've set out to acquire a Very Low Frequency (VLF) receiver , and have started the patches that will mix my didgeridoo playing with the sonic representation of atmospheric sounds.

Interesting to note that my single most popular post ever  - measured in number of views - was my prognostication on the 2012 Eurovision song contest


Backside of the Rosetta Stone

Rosetta1

Yes, the Rosetta stone is one of those things, isn't it?  Clearly important:  expect to hear Beethoven's 9th playing whenever it comes on stage, with a backdrop of the Eiffel Tower and a PInt of Guiness in hand.  

The Rosetta Stone decoded a culture  of wisdom, aesthetics, poetry, politics.  I saw it recently on a vacation trip that included a morning at the British museum.  I was there to take some photos of the Shabako stone, and had never really looked at the Rosetta Stone before.  But there it is, encased in glass, center of  the foyer.  You can walk around the stone, which means you can see the dark side of Rosetta, the unpublished side.  

 
This has a transfixing beauty to it,  like staring at the wall and seeing patterns in the plaster, or watching static on the TV.  Does 'proper' static even exist in hi-def digital?   (Also reminds me of The Scratch Pieces. ) But hieroglyphs are easy:  decode the backside of the Rosetta Stone, and you decode extra terrestrial communication.

     Rosetta2

 


Transduction, unheard music and Dreams of a Debauched Dodo

A while ago, in 2000, I gave a paper at a conference on Art and Science of Extraterrestrial Message Composition.  The conference was co-sponsored by SETI and by Leonardo, and Doug Vakoch wrote up a nice article afterwards.

I was interested in the physiology of sound, how our shaping of sound represents our bodies.   

My brief was that if we performed analysis on a large enough sample, we could identify some generic gestures, probably based on units of basic metabolism, and use that as material to construct an outbound message to ET.  

The tool for this was the spectrogram, which I started to write about in an earlier blog on Fourier transform. The spectrogram takes 'sound' out of 'music', presents the material as an artifact outside of culture.  

“A Waveform in one medium holds meaning in second.  The Paris paper started to suggest the idea of sound as an architectural object.  We could take all these sonic objects ("pieces of music"), create a morphology of generic structures, then transduce those to the electromagnetic spectrum.

(Elsewhere, I've commented on limitations of radio astronomy as the format for ET communication.)

The key to transduction is a shared measurement of Frequency.  Everything that unfolds in time can be measured with a frequency.   If something happens 10,000 times per second (10,000 Hertz)  in air, it can happen 10,000 times in electromagnetism.  Or in water.  Or soil.  Or if it happens once every 1017 seconds

To reiterate: when I say 'music', here I am not referring to cultural styles.  I am referring to the conscious manipulation of pattern as represented by a waveform that can be applied to any medium.

SCAN0045This handwritten graph sketches out the idea.  At the center is a linear axis, exponential values representing frequency from Zero to Infinity.

1 cycle per second, (1Hz)  is the human heartbeat.

The chart breaks down into bands of activity, representing  different sources of data, different medium.  I've been talking about Electromagnetism and the Audible Spectrum, both shown here:  but I also wanted to include biological, seismic, galactic time scales.  As the chart is developed I expect to include other animal characteristics such as whale song and insect noise.   I show  diurnal activity (ocean tides), the solar calendar and then a jump up to the current age of the universe. I could also draw a block that represents the frequency of the martian orbit, the rotation of the Milky Way, the Age of Aquarius or the frequency of a human life.

The graph represents transduction as a jump between bands - for example from audible to electromagnetic, or seismic to sonic.  This is more than just manipulating pitch to represent data.  There is a 3 dimensional mathematical artifact that is moving between media.

If we take the frequencies of Visible light (let's say around  1015 ) and Transduce that to Audible, we are first changing the mechanism generating the energy so that now energy moves through.   But we also need to consider Transposition.  1015  if played on an instrument ( a hell of an instrument) is far beyond the range of human hearing. Although sonoluminescence is an intriguing possibility.  But for us to 'hear' the pattern created by light, the number needs to be divided down so that it is more like 103 .

The math is interesting, because the fundamental relationships between frequencies are ratios rather than exact measurements.  The energy required to double the frequency is always the same.  To move from 440Hz to 880Hz requires the same energy as moving from 44000hz to 88000Hz.  Higher frequencies have a lower energy distribution.

Back to Paris for a moment.   The output of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a series of time-sequenced frequency arrays, which suggested to me that using some kind of algorithmic analysis (maybe humdrum?) I could look for shared sequences across a wide body of recorded samples.  Those sequences could occur in any of the measurable vectors - beginning with pitch, but also looking for patterns in the overtones, shared sequences of amplitude changes. 

(I've also thought that this could be a useful approach to whale song.  The analysis of whale song I've seen has assumed that change in pitch generates a bit of information - but if we were to apply that method to the Hildegaard sample I presented in Paris, we'd miss all the meaning.  I would propose an analysis of whale song that considers the periods of silence as a signifcator, or looks for patterns of changing amplitude at certain subsonic frequencies.)

The paper was really more a musing on the subject.  I also played a recording of a composition.  I was starting to think about composition in these generic terms.  Along with a didgeridoo, I used electronics to create other drones, pulses, nothing you would call a beat - repeated surges and upwellings.  We were fortunate to be hosted in the Malina family home:  Frank Malina was an engineer at NASA  and an artist.  Many of his pieces were painting overlapping lights with different levels that moved, rotated to create complex sequence of colour.  Roger Malina commented on how the aesthetic of the music merged well with his father's paintings.

The piece had been called Dream of a Debauched Dodo, I should dig up a cassette from the archive.  At the gentle insistence from Doug - who understood the audience better than I did -  I temporarily used the title Music for Didgeridoo and Electronics.

 

 



Fourier, Transduction and Alien Composers.

WhaleEye

One of the principles of Sonicism is:

“A Waveform in one medium holds meaning in second”

A wave is the movement of energy through a medium.  We are most familiar with 'sound', which is the motion of energy as waves in air.  A wave can be analyzed mathematically through a process called Fourier analysis.  Those results can be visually represented in a spectrum.  A spectrum is an analytical artifact, a visual representation of the results of Fourier analysis.  It is also a tool that allows for intuitive reckoning with the structure of the wave. 

This is a spectral analysis taken from a fragment of whale song. 

WhaleSpectrum



I use Sonic Visualiser, because it is awesome and because it is free. I remember seeing pitch analysis of whale song as an undergrad in a music theory lecture. Later reading of Robert Cogan showed how spectral analysis could be used for musical thinking.

The Y-axis of a spectrum (whether music or any other wave) represents frequency - think of it as the keys on a piano, with 'up' being 'higher'.   The width of these buckets is an important consideration.  On a piano, each key represents a half step.  There are obviously an infinite degree of smaller steps in between each recognized pitch, and the same is true of the frequency buckets used for Fourier analysis.

[Now is not the time to get in to details about the well-tempered systems, plural, used on the piano over the past 4 centuries.  Suffice to say that the above statement referring to equal half steps is incorrect by ommission.  ]

So we define the granularity of the frequencies that will be represented in the analysis.  A standard default is 1026 across the audible spectrum, roughly considered 20 - 20,000 hz.  That math is beyond me, but it means that some equal distribution of frequency is assumed.

The X-axis represents time.  Just as we broke down the frequency range into buckets, so we break time into discrete windows.  Each window of time captures the frequencies present in each bucket at that instant.  From this information, our analytical tool paints a pretty picture.

Fourier analysis is based on the insight that a complex wave can be represented as the sum of many sine waves.  A complex form is revealed as a series of discrete waves, each represented at a particular frequency.  The width of the Y-axis frequency buckets in the spectrum  determines how precise we can be in isolating each discrete wave.  If those waves were added back together, the peaks and troughs would enhance or cancel each other, and the original complex waveform would be re-calculated.

Fourier analysis assumes that the wave is unchanging after the first period. Music obviously *does* change over time, as do most complex wave patterns. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) performs Fourier analysis on each window of time, and then sequences those slices of time together. 

The results of Fourier analysis can be reversed to generate the original sound. They can also be manipulated before engineering the sound.  Visual forms can be constructed to create new waveforms.This is a particularly rich source of compositional inspiration.

Back to Sonicism. It matters not if the wave under analysis is taken from sound (energy vibrating in air) , from ocean (energy vibrating in water) from the sun (energy vibrating in the electromagnetic spectrum). If the wave can be represented mathematically, it can be engineered in any other medium.

When NASA releases ‘The Sounds of Jupiter”, we should not imagine a giant booming noise emanating across the solar system. Well, we should imagine that, because that would be cool. But what has really happened is a representation of the electromagnetic wave as a sound wave. This process, moving waves across medium, is called Transduction.

There’s a bit of coinage going on there, I use the term very loosely. A very familiar transducer is the mechanism in the human ear that takes energy waves in air and reforms them as electrical impulses in the human brain. The HiFi speaker does the same thing, taking electrical impulses from the piezo mechanism on the LP needle and groove, transferring them into vibrations on the speaker cone which then activate energy in the air.

If we were to take the direct values of the electromagnetism of the sun and represent directly as sound, it would be outside the audible spectrum. The values need to be mathematically modeled so that they appear within the desired range of the target medium. This process, we call Transposition ( a solid musical term). The maths are complex because an octave is exponential not linear: always twice the frequency. So 800 is an octave above 400 (difference of 400). 8000 is an octave above 4000 (difference of 4000).

And the octave is a relationship worth preserving in any medium.

Transduction and Transposition gives the artist a powerful set of concepts and tools.  I write ‘music’ that is ultimately intended for electromagnetic ‘performance’. It is not ‘heard’.   It is not really experienced . The musical forms exist only within the electromagnetic spectrum.  (See notes on Voices of the Noosphere, for radio telescope and didgeridoo as well as Keynote Address on Music as Cultural Dialogue, which I presented at UNESCO in 2010

What if we create waveforms that would be 'played' within the Earth, a controlled seismic event?  Or establish and control standing waves on the surface of a lake - like an enormous chinese water bowl.  Light patterns that are the direct corrollary to a piece of music - not just a laser show, but the actual transposition of sound to light?  The process is like some geomantic matrix, rich in the capability to psychogeographically manipulate the environment/noosphere. 

I imagine this is how we will identify ET culture. Their ‘instruments’ will be galactic, manipulation of gravity waves, structures of electromagnetism, formulation of time.