Sonifying science and snooker : investigating relationships between music and external phenomena
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 54372355
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The research investigates how the construction of tangible relationships between music and external phenomena can provide new perspectives on those phenomena and enliven musical materials through the application of an external logic. The compositions use representational strategies including sonification, an approach that involves the ‘transformation of non-sonic data into audible form’ (Sterne and Akiyama, 2012), in order to represent, analyse and provide new insights into data sets. They can be broadly positioned within ‘relational music’, a significant trend within contemporary experimental music practice that denotes compositions that explicitly activate relationships between music and an aspect of the world. Virus musically represents processes within the HIV replication cycle, culminating with a sonification of how ‘shock and kill’ drug therapies offer a potential cure for HIV. Sciencesound mappings include the ordering and transformation of musical motives representing the nucleotides of DNA and RNA (e.g. b.4-10 symbolise RNA nucleotides GGUGCGA) in combination with signals representing biological switches and triggers (e.g. samba whistle signifying initiation of HIV transcription). In addition to offering audiences new ways of conceptualising scientific phenomena or reading snooker play, sonification procedures also generate originality within the musical domain. Whereas many applications of sonification eschew stylistic referentiality, in 147 external elements are represented by musical figures that explicitly engage tropes from vernacular musical idioms (e.g. jazz walking bass from b.248 of 147; Four on the floor disco beat reinforcing accumulation of Rev proteins in Virus [b.477-484]). In acts of defamiliarisation, the works investigate how the expressive qualities and functionality of musical materials can be subverted (e.g. denial of cadential closure in final moment of Virus) or redefined (e.g. 147 chord choices and/ or progressions determined by colour of ball potted), and how external structures can provide original and idiosyncratic methods for organising interplay between ideas
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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