~ MUSIC OF THE SPHERES ~
Music of the Spheres sonifies and visualizes the astrology of the COVID-19 pandemic from March 13, 2020 through March 12, 2022. The idea behind the piece was to make apparent, both in sound and in images, any parts of the pandemic experience that may have been learning or growth curves without kodi crone having realized it.
For the Max/MSP patch, the sounds of the moon, sun, venus, mars, jupiter and saturn draw on the explorations of notes linked to the planets by Pythagoras’ Brotherhood between 531 and 500 BCE.
These notes were later ascribed to specific keys by Johannes Kepler in 1619. In this piece, the specific keys for each planet are expressed in synthesizer, piano, accordion and theremin sounds, with the patch randomly selecting one of these instruments along with the patch’s synthesizer every time a planet is triggered in the pandemic astrology data set.
For the astrological signs, specific field recordings were selected for each sign. The data set for both Max/MSP and p5.js is driven by the moon, facilitating the interaction between the two programs.
In the p5.js sketch, images of the planets spawn every time the planets are triggered in the dataset. This spawning coincides with the triggering of the sounds ascribed to the planets in Max/MSP.
The p5.js sketch speaks to a more materialist view, where the planets are appropriately named ‘particles’ in p5.js code . The Max/MSP patch additionally offers a complete experience, where sound is added to affect the way we compose reality in our minds.
