“Have you ever listened to sunlight?” asks Kat Austen on the New Scientist blog CultureLab. “I have. And not just sunlight: in a dimly lit London basement last week, I also enjoyed the harmony of humidity, wind speed, and other meteorological minutiae thanks to a sound art duo who have worked out how to turn the weather into sweet, sweet music. Variable 4 is the brainchild of composer James Bulley and erstwhile computer scientist Daniel Jones. The pair met when they were shortlisted for the New Cross Art Prize in 2008 and a discussion about where music, art and computing meet ensued. This led them to the idea of a sound art installation where the music played was composed by contemporaneous weather conditions. .. Using custom tailored algorithms, a computer program navigates between different elements of the musical score, which it controls at both the movement and note level—changing pitch, tempo and expression by switching between pre-recorded snippets of music from 24 separate movements composed in all the Western major and minor keys. The artistic input to the music is the framework within which the weather composes.”
Posted July 7, 2011
