“My Internal Shazam”. This is sketch number two from a 12 week collaborative sensory data mapping project with my friend Caroline Chourou, who is doing MA Fine Art at Bournemouth University. You can take a look at the project as it evolves here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/interflux where there's an (admittedly basic) animated gif of this, I ain't an animator but wanted to inject some movement into this. This week's theme for our embodied data mapping project is “sound maps”.
“We listen to music with our muscles” says Nietzsche, this piece represents my physiological response to a particular piece of music which my friend Si Edwards @edula sent through to me last week upon my request for minimal tunes to accompany our theme: “Nothing”. Oliver Sacks in “Musicophilia” says: “Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music. How much this is due to the intrinsic characteristics of music itself – its complex sonic patterns woven in time, it's logic, its momentum, its unbreakable sequences, it's insistent rhythms and repetitions, the mysterious way in which it embodies emotion and “will” - and how much to special resonances, synchronizations, oscillations, mutual excitations, or feedbacks in the immensely complex, multilevel neural circuitry that underlies musical perception and replay, we do not yet know.” Our bodies can provide the raw material for music. Blain-Moraes, engineer and musician, has devised biomusic which draws information from the autonomic nervous system to produce sound portraits of coma patients http://nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/whats-the-sound-of-personhood. Professor Eduardo R Miranda is developing biocomputer interfaces to compose music http://neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/ and this is a project funded by the Wellcome Trust which teams up scientists, musicians and physicians to produce sound portraits of organs in the body.
My central nervous system certainly feels tuned into sound, I trained it to be so. I have a chronic pain condition and use sound, shape to transform the experience of pain into sensation, it's a sort of learned sensory orchestration. My internal shazam whirrs around and as it picks up amplified pain signals it simultaneously picks up sound to tenuate them as it oscillates, vibrates. It doesn't take me to a track listing but does serve as a sort of internal navigating system, helps me to maintain a degree of equilibrium. Soundscapes reduce stasis, rhythm and mitre help my legs to walk when they have all but stopped.
Below is a scan of the item I sent Caroline this week. Each week we send each other something through the post related to the theme, at the end of the project we will make a piece based on the items received through the post. She's gonna be confused as hell by this. The track I listened to for the Shazam piece above was 56 minutes 20 seconds long. I sent her the track and was planning to send the numbers printed on black stickers to emulate a screenshot of the black 'play pause' screen I had, but actually the outside of the stickers (the grid below) looked kinda more interesting, so I sent her a strip of 56 and a strip of 20.
