The final week of our project

When starting this project just three weeks ago, our goal was to explore methods of representing intangible phenomena with sound. In this final week, we bring together everything we have worked on to create an interactive exhibition, showcasing our sonification on a university open day to members of the public and academics from the university.

Summary of week 4

This week, our goal was to get everything set up for the exhibition on Friday. With the equipment acquired and the room booked, we needed to put everything together before the deadline of the showcase. Naturally this week was more stressful, with ‘the stakes and tensions raised as we approached the presentation’, but there was also a sense of pride ‘with how far we’ve managed to take this project’.

• Day 1: We created a final version of our 5.1 sound file, and set up the speaker system ready for testing. However, we had some issues with the speakers, and eventually had to ask one of the supervisors for support, before managing to fix it. It was clear that ‘we all felt frustrated’, as we had tried several different approaches to solving the issue, but did not succeed without help. Despite the frustration, it was clear that we worked well as a team, with one member reporting that ‘we all remained calm and positive, with everyone taking part in trying to solve the problem’. Once the issues were resolved, we were ready to test the sound. It was nice to see that our hard work had paid off with the speaker set, and we felt ‘excited to see how (the project) comes together over the last few days’.

• Day 2: was spent finalising everything before we could access the booked room the next day. One of the physics students worked on finalising the visuals using Hydra, and reported that this process was ‘quite challenging’ as the coding language was not one that had been used before. Once everything was working, we all agreed that the visuals would work well with the sonification. The remaining students worked on creating posters to email out and put up around campus to advertise the event, and created other labels we could put up in the event space that would make clear where our data had come from. We all felt excited to share our work, and one student believed that ‘our open communication and collaborative working style will support the success of our event’.

• Day 3: Today we were handed the keys to the Tic Space in the Fine Art building, the room chosen for our exhibition. We spent the day moving equipment to this space, setting the speakers and projector up and taping down wires to ensure safety. It was ‘really exciting to finally be able to see the space we’ve got to work with’, and we all noted the echo and acoustics of the room. Given that the room was slightly hidden beneath a staircase, it was agreed that we would need signs to direct people to our exhibition. After running a few sound checks, we discussed whether there was anything else we could change or add to make the most of the space. We felt confident seeing the exhibition set up, and were ‘excited to show the supervisors tomorrow’.

• Day 4: We ‘enjoyed spending today refining everything… and testing different volumes’ of the speakers to get the output we wanted. We felt ‘a little nervous’ about sharing our work with the supervisors, but their visit proved useful and we happily took their suggestions on board. It seemed that ‘everyone was excited’ by our installation, and looking forward to it running the following day. Given the short notice of organising the event, we worked well together and did ‘everything we could to promote (it)’.

• Day 5: The Installation- We ran the installation from 10am to 3pm, and tried to rotate roles to ensure all members of our group had time for breaks. We found that ‘the most challenging part was trying to maintain a steady stream of people’ with all the open day activities happening, leading to a discussion about how we could have improved advertising if we had more time to organise the event. But by the end of the day, we felt ‘proud’ and ‘supported’, estimating that 50-60 people had visited our installation, which students found ‘really surprising’. The general consensus was that the day was a success, and many people ‘seemed to be really interested’ in our work. We felt that ‘we did a good job in achieving (our goals)’ and that ‘the project was an overall success’. We even have a potential future opportunity to explore the project, as someone working at an observatory seemed interested in what we had been doing.

Black Hole Sonification

We successfully sonified the gravitational wave data of a black hole collision event, as seen in the previous weeks blog post. We used data from the USA’s LIGO and Italy’s VIRGO sites, and incorporated this into our installation by having different speakers output data from the different locations. We used the groups musical knowledge to add volume mapping and a bass drop at the collision event to really emphasise this astrophysical phenomenon, resulting in an experience where you could ‘almost feel’ the event. We achieved our aim of an installation where people could walk around and experience the interactions of the different sounds in real time, making intangible gravitational waves more tangible.

Below is our final 5.1 sound track

The binaural version of the sound track with video:

Available here

The only major downside of this project was the limited timescale. As a group, we had so many initial ideas and different approaches that we could have explored, and it is a shame that we had to pick only one to work on in order to achieve our goals. This may be where some feelings of ‘compromising’ stemmed from.

Final thoughts

During this project, we ‘worked well as an interdisciplinary group’ to achieve our goals, with each of our skillsets proving invaluable. The experience was enjoyable and we ‘learnt a lot about each other’s fields’.

Over the four-week project, we explored different methods of sonification, some more interpretive and some more data driven. The final product was a combination of both: directly sonified data that we mixed using musical software, and then showcased in an interactive way, such that the very space used for the installation contributed to the resulting sonification. When talking about using the space, one member of the group said that they ‘enjoyed that each location occupied one section of the room so that when walking around in the soundscape you were effectively walking around the world.’ In other words, the resulting sonification was a blend of our teams three disciplines; astrophysics, music and art.