Vol. 31 Issue 1 Reviews

ICAD 2006: Global Music—The World by Ear

International Conference on Auditory Display, Queen Mary’s College University of London, London, UK, 20-23 June 2006.

Reviewed by Edward Childs
Sharon, Vermont, USA

The 2006 ICAD (International Conference on Auditory Display), held at Queen Mary’s College University of London (20-23 June, 2006), featured a sonification concert modeled after the “Listening to the Mind Listening” presentation at the Sydney Opera House on 8 July, 2004 (see review in CMJ 29:1). At that concert, masterminded by Stephen Barrass, ten sonifications of a data set measuring EEG, heart rate, breathing, etc., of Dr. Evian Gordon listening to “Dry Mud” from Fish, by David Page, were presented. The music lasted five minutes, as did all ten pieces, which were constrained to adhere to the timeline of the original data.

This year’s concert, “Global Music—The World by Ear,” held at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London on 21 June, sponsored by the London Centre for Contemporary Arts and Cultural Enterprise, and organized by Alberto De Campo, director of the SonEnvir project in Graz, Austria, resulted from a call to sonify a basic geographical dataset (2005 snapshot) from 190 countries consisting of capital location, area, and population, extended by several basic social indicators such as GDP, access to sanitation and drinking water, and life expectancy. All submissions were to include “countries, capital locations, population, and area data.” Extensions to the basic data were encouraged. Participants were to provide eight soundfiles at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz/16-bit linear, spatialized for a horizontal symmetrical ring of eight loudspeakers.

Most composers used some form of panning to relate longitude. The two dimensional layout of the speaker ring precluded a spatial mapping of latitude.

As in Sydney, the eight responses to the same data set in the London concert were extremely diverse, both in approach to the basic required data and in the selection of extended data. However, the global music dataset presented a new question: “What data does one use for the timeline of the piece?” As with music, data sonifications must evolve over time. When the data has its own timeline, the general practice is to use it (sometimes with speed adjustments) as the timeline of the sonification.

The ICAD 2006 concert data had no inherent timeline, rather being a snapshot of global statistics in the year 2005. The invention of a timeline involves the imposition of order, tempo, and rhythm by the composer. If a data set, such as military spending in 190 countries, is chosen, then the notes or klangs, whose pitch, volume, duration, timbre, etc., are controlled by other statistics, such as life expectancy, access to drinking water, etc., are ordered from sorting the amount of spending in ascending, descending, or some other strategy. Once the order is determined, tempo and rhythm must also be determined.

Tim Barrass, the only contributor to the 2004 concert who submitted in 2006, came up with a most compelling timeline strategy in Life Expectancy. The ordering of notes was by life expectancy, however, Mr. Barrass chose to order the notes starting with the country with the highest life expectancy, followed by the lowest, followed by the next highest, etc. Furthermore, the ensuing “notes” were actually two-second bars, each containing sonifications of drinking water access, GDP, population, etc., all conveyed by intuitive sounds such as water being poured, clinking coins, the number of voices proclaiming the country, etc. Altogether, eight parameters were conveyed in each bar. After a brief consultation of a score provided by Mr. Barrass, the sonifications were very easy to follow. Mr. Barrass’s work should be considered a landmark in the auditory display of multi-dimensional information in a compact and elegant style.

David E. Spondike, in his three movement piece Schnappschuss von der Erde, chose to change the timeline multiple times within each movement. For example, the order of the notes in one section of the middle movement “L’Ostinati” correlates with the military spending. The pitch of the notes is determined by GDP-per-capita and loudness by CO2 emissions. A change in the sort order was marked by a timbral change. Working with data in spreadsheet format but first converted to text files, Mr. Spondike used Symbolic Composer 5.0.1 to generate MIDI files. The tempo for all movements was the same, with all notes evenly spaced. Musical interest was generated through melodic patterns, timbral and volume changes (accents), and spatialization. In a similar manner, Brian Willkie and David Curtis, in Global Disease Music, vary the timeline in each movement, in some cases using temporal data from the 1918 flu pandemic. In the opening movement, they chose to sonify countries and capitals with speech synthesis, augmenting the speech with granular clouds to sonify population and land area. In this case the tempo was determined by the length of time required for the country and capital name to be read. In the second movement, data for the number of deaths per 1000 in 46 countries was presented simultaneously, using FM synthesis.

Julian Rohrhuber, in Terra Nullius, chose to use longitude as the time variable, which together with the spatialization, resulted in multiple perceived circumnavigations of the equator. During the first pass, only data from countries near the latitude of Greenwich is audible; during subsequent passes, data from further to the North and South may be heard. The pace of the circumnavigations is controlled by the composer and appears to have no relation with a data set. Mr. Rohrhuber used filtered noise for data presentation, primarily to highlight gaps in the availability of data for many countries . . . the more noise content, the less data.

Ambrose Field, in CIA Fact Book, manipulated the data toward the primary end of fashioning a compelling piece of music. The composition has a teleological feel, with many fascinating transitions and distinct movements. A large library of very short duration samples (micro sounds no longer than 0.5 sec) was used. The piece, presented on the ICAD Web site (www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/icad2006/proceedings/concert/index.html) as a stereo mix, is not really intended to be a recognizable guide through the data so much as a composition using the data as basic raw materials.

Alberto de Campo and Christian Dayé, in Navegar É Preciso and Guillaume Potard, in Guernica 2006, chose to impose a timeline from some other context (thus taking care of order, tempo and rhythm). Mr. De Campo and Mr. Dayé navigate the data (both in space and time) using Magellan’s voyage to the Moluccan Islands in 1519-1522. Mr. Potard uses a global history of warfare, from year 0 to the present, against a backdrop of a drone whose pitch represents population growth. The occurrence of wars is portrayed using samples of sounds (swords, horses, bombs) appropriate for the historical period in which the war occurred.

Kalika N. Doloswala, in Water Is Life introduced some additional temporal data, such as the deterioration in access to clean drinking water and sanitation during 1990-2002 to shape the time evolution of some sections of the piece. However, the ICAD baseline data was imported into Audacityand Sound Forgeaudio software and processed to form samples, then controlled by means of a Max/MSPpatch. The controlling parameters are derived from other data relating to life expectancy. Thus, the listener’s perception of time in Water Is Life does not seem to relate to the data consistently.

Returning to Carla Scaletti’s original definition of sonification—to communicate relations in the data—the works of Mr. Barrass and Mr. Potard were the most effective; indeed they could be listened to and understood almost without detailed written explanation or program notes. The clarity of their work is reminiscent of Sine Family Tree, an exemplary sonification project by Douglas Repetto of Columbia University (music.columbia.edu/~douglas/portfolio/sinefamilytree/).