Output details

Cloud Chamber (the composition, software and hardware development, and performance of music expressing physics processes)

This partially-improvised performance researched, in various configurations, how music might be able to make the quantum world visible, thereby expressing the processes of fundamental particle physics. It premiered at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival (February 2011) and was subsequently performed at Rutherford-Appleton Labs UK, invited by ISIS Neutron and Muon Source (January 2012), and at California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco (June 2013), performed at the banquet of the world’s main conference on fundamental particle physics (“Lepton-Photon 2013”). Kirke developed the concept, composed the music, and managed the project and software and hardware development. In previous works inspired by particle physics, there had been no real-time interaction between physics processes and other parts of the performance (see, for instance, Brody 1997; Sturm 2001; Coleman 2003; O’Flaherty 2009). Cloud Chamber therefore explicitly aimed to create a strategy to involve particles in live interactive musical performances by developing an instrument which can be “played” live by atomic particles. Moreover, in the configurations for the first and third performances, not only did the particles influence and create sound, but the accompanying solo violin directly or indirectly influenced the particles physically. This two-way process utilises cosmic rays entering a glass chamber, saturated with ethanol and cooled by liquid nitrogen, making the particles in the cosmic radiation visible in real time. Visual recognition methods, granular synthesis and electrical field generation – controlled in some performance-configurations by the violin and in others by the composer – enable an interaction between the subatomic particle tracks and the acoustic element of the performance. A paper on the direct-violin influence configuration delivered at the International Computer Music Conference, and published in its proceedings (2011), and an article in Leonardo (2013), have disseminated this methodology to computer musicians and interdisciplinary artists respectively.