Chemical Symphony (Critical Zones)

Chemical Symphony is my contribution to the exhibition »Critical Zones«, Observatories for Earthly Politics in ZKM of Karlsruhe (Germany), on the impetus of the famous sociologist Bruno Latour.

I sonified the data of a device called RiverLab, in collaboration with a geophysicist, through 3 sequences depicting the river's physico-chemical fluctuations at different time scales. For ex., the sunshine is depicted by the thickness and color of an orchestral chord, as by DMX-controlled light; potassium variations by oboes...

Max was used throughout the process. The raw data was resampled, normalized and written in a mc soundfile (1 sample = 10 mn of data). gen~ allows to read the data accurately. River flow controls the reading speed; chemical variations are mapped to musical algorithms playing binaural-spatialized orchestral samples. The exhibition patch runs mc soundfiles with 8 mixdowned sonic layers, linked to curves' opacity; 2 data layers (DMX and cursor).