“Music and ‘the fundamental nature of the universe'” – Christl de Kloe

Valery Vermeulen, mathematician and musician, provided us, in the second TiM seminar, with some interesting insights into what interdisciplinary work can look like. Amongst others, he presented a project where he makes music “using data stemming from space and deep space and astrophysical models” (“Mikromedas – Valeryvermeulen.Net” n.d.). In this blog, I will discuss two questions that might be interesting to consider in relation to this project from a Humanities perspective.

For his project called Mikromedas, Vermeulen said that he converted light waves captured by satellites, into sound waves. These sound waves were then ‘cut and pasted’ (in his words ‘kind of like a deejay’) by Vermeulen into musical compositions. In his talk, he seemed to suggest that the light waves that are there, in the universe, are simply captured by the satellites. However, Karen Barad, feminist theorist of amongst others physics, discusses in “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning” (2007) the role that apparatuses (analytical, measuring instruments) play in the becoming of phenomena. Light, she discusses, seems to behave like a wave, “but under different experimental circumstances, light [seems] to behave like a particle” (Barad 2007, 29). In measuring interactions certain properties become determinate (Barad 2007, 19). In the measurement interactions, in relation to the measuring instruments within the satellite, the light thus becomes a wave. The data of the light waves that are the starting point for Vermeulen’s project Mikromedas are thus not necessarily a reflection of some state of the universe but are rather becoming within the measurement interaction. A discussion of the apparatuses in relation to this work might give us more insight into how very specific understandings are created rather than reflecting.

Second, throughout this second seminar, I was wondering what it might ‘mean’ for the artwork that the data that Vermeulen is using, is ‘stemming from’ the universe. I was reminded of Andrew Huang, a musician who, in one of his YouTube videos, jokingly says that his composition “start to show me the fundamental nature of the universe” (Huang 2017). Funnily enough, the data that he is using for his compositions stem from noises made by his radiator and the water and air within the radiator system. In relation to both these music compositions, it could be very interesting to think about what role the ‘aura’ of the onto-epistemological data plays in music compositions.

References

• Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Huang, Andrew. 2017. I Spent a Year Recording Radiators to Make Music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POtV24aOI5s.
• “Mikromedas – Valeryvermeulen.Net.” n.d. Accessed December 17, 2019. https://www.valeryvermeulen.net/works/mikromedas/.