“Music is math, unfortunately” – Angelo Zinna

Despite the length of my relatively short-lived career as a student of literature, there is one recurring question I am confronted with on a regular basis that I have learned to answer without hesitancy. To those who inquire on whether investing years of one’s life reading (and, at times, rereading) novels, verse, and comics often written by deceased people isn’t just a very time-consuming hobby, I tend to respond by acknowledging the negative impact that obtaining an education in the humanities may have in both the personal sphere, considering that in the contemporary job market literacy is not usually referred to as a profitable occupation, and the social sphere, considering that at this point in life I am unlikely to acquire the skills necessary to fix what in this world needs to
be fixed; in other words, yes, it is just a time-consuming hobby. Trading a present of textual entertainment for a future of potential burger-flipping may not appear as a sagacious deal for the ordinary inquisitor – with good reason, it will most certainly prove not to be -, however, the acceptance of a precarious tomorrow does not fuel as much antagonism as the idea that my relationship with prose may come at a high cost for the community both me and the omniscient asker have found ourselves living within. Doing for the sake of doing does not seem to gather much support, neither moral nor financial, when resources are limited and issues requiring immediate action are delivered daily at an Amazon Prime speed through the media, especially if compared with the doing for the sake of discovering, solving, improving typical of the sciences. Fair enough, I say. Yet, to my surprise, it turns out that creative practice as an end in itself does not belong solely to the more poetically-inclined among us.

While Boards of Canada had, already in 2002, postulated that music is math,
Valery Vermeulen, mathematician-slash-music composer, took this to the next level succeeding in transforming something as incredibly difficult to understand for the uninitiated mind as black holes into something even more abstract and hard to grasp – sound. Through a process of data sonification, Vermeulen produces electronic music by converting information originating in space into sound waves. The aim of such metamorphosis is to allow the listener to “experience” the black hole, using art as an alternative tool to analytical data that allows for space to be “looked at” through the senses rather than the numbers. By contextualizing Vermeulen’s practice in Jason Tuckwell’s conceptualization of art explained in the previous session of Transmissions in Motion, the sonification of data and its later editing into a music piece appears as a great example of deviation from “nature’s telos” where the artist’s agency creates “genuine difference” (Tuckwell 2019) by manipulating what is coming into being on a primary level.

By addressing how nature in itself can be employed as an instrument to fuel
creativity, Vermeulen showed how the realms of art and science may not be as divided as they are commonly thought to be; however, when discussing the purpose of projects such as Mikromeda, objectives seem to be clashing. If, on the one hand, the goal of black hole sonification is to offer a better understanding of the universe, the editing process appears to alter the truthfulness of sound. If, on the other, the ultimate aim is to make music that is “not boring” (Vermeulen 2019), then data appears as a limiting instrument. Perhaps due to my bigoted view of science as purely objective and utilitarian, I see the artist’s desire to create music worth listening to colliding with the scientists need for unbiased results, making me question whether all of this isn’t just a very time-consuming hobby presented within a scientific setting for it to be taken seriously, since doing for the sake of doing is not, and that is a shame.

References

• Tuckwell, Jason. 2019. “Agency and technē in creative practice.” Seminar Transmission in Motion, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, 13 November 2019.
• nonameno5.”Boards of Canada – Music Is Math”. Youtube video, 5:21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7bKe_Zgk4o.