“Swarm” - a sonification of the 2016 cage trials by Imperial College London.

Sonification is an active exploration into the issues behind the represented objects, while creating in ways that are both responsible and engaging to audiences. I’m grateful to partner with Target Malaria, to co-create a sonification piece from its gene drive research data.

Using data from a landmark 2016 paper by Imperial College London, I created
“Swarm”, a two-minute long piece, sonifying the cage trials of gene drive mosquitoes. The trials test the modification of a gene important for female fertility to reduce the population of malaria mosquitoes using the gene drive technology. As demonstrated in computer models, the cage trials showed a rapid spread of the genetic modification, as well as an eventual population crash in the targeted species.

It is a privilege to live and travel in areas where experiences with mosquitos tend to be relatively benign; being bitten all over on a trip into nature, a silent negotiation with a still form on the ceiling, a shock out of sleep by high pitched whining next to our ears. However in malaria-stricken areas, an experience with mosquitos brings the threat of death, the knowledge that it is responsible for loved ones already lost, a battle with hundreds of attackers in an unshielded home.

My intention was to sonically convey the sense of threat from a swarm of malaria-carrying mosquitos (informed by the real experience of people in places like Burkina Faso), which diminishes over time as the population collapses. The progression of the piece leads the swarm to a state of stillness, the calm of a quiet evening, as harmonies represent a rising gene modification rate. The combined effect demonstrates the scope of the technology and hopefully expresses a sense of relief from harm.

Burkina Faso is one of the most highly malaria-infected places in the world. The disease is responsible for almost half of health provider consultations and one in five deaths. The world’s estimated number of malaria deaths stood at 627,000 in 2020, with 80% of all deaths in the Africa Region being children under five. My hope is that the sonification will shed light on threats to people in malaria- stricken areas, and to raise awareness on gene drive technology, which, if ethically managed, could be crucial for the worldwide fight against malaria.

“Swarm” uses the 2016 Cr-Z4050E5 Cage Trials, published in a 2018 landmark paper in Nature by Imperial College London: A CRISPR–Cas9 gene drive targeting doublesex causes complete population suppression in caged Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes. Target Malaria also gave me additional data on two more cages that were not included in the publication.

Sonification details:

“Swarm” sonifies four concurrent cage trials over a number of generations, creating four sonic layers of Hatching Rate, Egg Totals and RFP% over time. The first 10 seconds are just mosquito sounds to give listeners a sense of a swarm out of control, and then the 2016 Cr-Z4050E5 Cage Trials start at eleven seconds into the piece. This list shows the cage trail component sonified, which sound was used to represent it, and the type of sonification method used:

CT component: Hatching rate
Sound: Mosquito swarm sample
Method: Dynamic (softer as mosquito number decreases)

CT component: Time in days
Sound: Mosquito Kick drum
Method: Time marker, temporal, simple keeping of time (1 beat per day, 1 rhythmic beat per generation / week)

CT component: Generation number (weeks)
Sound: Percussion fill, bell tree
Method: Time marker, temporal, simple keeping of time (sounding every 7 days)

CT component: Egg totals
Sound: Hatching sfx sample (candy wrap sound)
Method: Dynamic (softer as egg number decreases). You hear a hatching sound at the beginning of each generation (every 7 days)

CT component: RFP+ % (gene modification rate)
Sound: Synth
Method: Harmonic (pitch rises as gene modification increases)

Swarm - A Sonification Of The 2016 Cage Trials By Imperial College London - Jamie Perera

Trump's Paris Pullout is a sonic treatment of the entire speech of Donald Trump announcing his decision to withdraw U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement on Jun 1st, 2017. Using various fact checking publications, Trump's speech is distorted according to the level of untruths within it. From minimisations to exaggerations to outright fabrications, what is revealed is that within this speech is that it is difficult to ascertain when Trump is telling the truth at all. As written by Vox "It is a remarkable address, in its own way, in that virtually every passage contains something false or misleading. The sheer density of bullshit is almost admirable, from a performance art perspective. Trump even managed to get in some howlers that had nothing to do with climate change. He started by citing an act of terrorism in Manila that wasn’t terrorism".  As Scientific American writes, "President Trump justified his decision yesterday to leave a global climate accord with debunked conservative talking points and studies funded by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry... From the costs and benefits to the global impacts, the president cherry-picked his talking points to support withdrawing from the agreement."

This sonification of Trump's untruths comments on the lack of balance in the climate debate, and serves as a temporal intervention, retrospectively giving the facts agency to deny the corrupt speaker. Any attempt to misinform, fabricate or lie is distorted, informing the listener of both the act and the level of the act whilst ridiculing the attempt. Mirrored in this is the notion that climate change also is unresponsive to such manipulations, and has broader contexts and stakes that are massive, real, and that need to be confronted.

Sources:
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/factchecking-trumps-climate-speech/
https://climateanalytics.org/media/fact_check_trump_pa_withdrawal_announcement.pdf
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/factcheck-shows-trumps-climate-speech-was-full-of-misleading-statements/
https://www.businessinsider.com/fact-check-trump-reasons-for-leaving-paris-agreement-2017-6?r=US&IR=T
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2017/jun/02/presidents-paris-climate-speech-annotated-trumps-claims-analysed

Trump Paris Pullout - A sonification of Trump's untruths exiting the Paris Climate Agreement

Three Matryoshkas

Resonant Signals | ZLB Library Berlin | Workshop Zwei | 3rd Sep 2022

In a one-day workshop a group of 10 people from Berlin explored data related to environment and community. The work they created represents three vastly differing time periods in a single work, simultaneously questioning three existential issues in order of magnitude. The chosen datasets were four years of Russian gas exports, nested within 150 years of global surfaces temperature, nested within 10,000 years of carbon dioxide levels. 

Drawing parallels with being at the centre of a set of three matryoshkas or Russian dolls, the work comments on the human tendency to see only the crises that are closest to us in time and space, with an insight into how fleeting our viewpoints are in planetary terms. In one year, the Russia-Ukraine war sends ripples across global economies, but it obscures dire warnings from the IPCC on global temperature levels. In turn we see that our burning of fossil fuels has sent carbon dioxide levels soaring 50% above the preindustrial level. By juxtaposing these datasets we can see the huge timespans of change, disrupted - and maybe irretrievably damaged - by our economic activities.

The Berlin artists’ intent materialised to allow us space - if only briefly – to reflect on that timespan. Presented in this sonic form, our tipping points are dramatically slowed down, suggesting that the matryoshkas in this instance - the things that obscure our vision - are created by our appreciation of time. Could developing an ability to see things from the perspective of centuries, ages and epochs give us agency within what seems to be inevitable?

Sonification Details:

“Three Matryoshkas” is a sonification of three datasets within a combined timeline that changes as we experience the data. At key points in the timeline below, time slows dramatically when new datasets join (e.g. at 1950 and 2018) and gets faster when these datasets end (e.g. 2022). 

Timeline: 
0:00		8000 BC		Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere (PPMV)
2:50		1950			(joined by) Global Surface Temperature (°C)
4:23		2018			(joined by) Russian Natural Gas Exports (Cub M MN)
7:08		2022			(end of) Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere (PPMV)
7:08		2022			(end of) Russian Natural Gas Exports (Cub M MN)
8:55		2100			(end of) Global Surface Temperature (°C)

Sounds used:
Global: 
Time slows down 	- winding down SFX 
Time speeds up	- winding up SFX
 
Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere (PPMV):
Synth, bubbles SFX, stone scraping SFX, speckled noise.
From 2:47 (1760) cotton mill, steel mill, car manufacture, plant room and plane turbo SFX. 

Global Surface Temperature (°C):
People talking, ocean waves and trickling water SFX

Russian Natural Gas Exports by Country:
German gas imports from Russia: Flute
French gas imports from Russia: Low and bass woodwinds

Data sources: 
Russian Natural Gas Exports by country:
https://www.ceicdata.com/
IPCC Report 2021 - Future Warming Pathways
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/summary-for-policymakers/figure-spm-8
10,000 Years of Carbon Dioxide:
http://berkeleyearth.org/dv/10000-years-of-carbon-dioxide/

Artist Credits:

Alistair Alexander (Reclaimed Systems)
Dirk Estorf
Dominik Irtenkauf
Håkan Jonsson @h-kan-jonsson-1
Tim Leik (ZLB Library)
Franziska Kanes 
Jamie Perera
Charlotte Quintuple
Christine Mackensen
Katja Stelmaszyk
Irina Stockmann
Eliana Araque

Three Matryoshkas

The story of our chemical past, present and future made into a sonification piece that demonstrates the immense scale of the chemical problem, exemplified with DDT and PFAS, based on the figure created by Dagny Aurich as part of “Avoiding the Next Silent Spring: Our Chemical Past, Present, and Future” by Hans Peter H. Arp, Dagny Aurich, Emma L. Schymanski, Kerry Sims and Sarah Hale (2023) Environmental Science and Technology, 57, 16, 6355–6359. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c01735. The heartbeat tracks time, the clicking noise represents the growth in chemical numbers (right axis), the chords the patent numbers (stripes), while key events (blue/purple) have their own distinct sound.

Composition and Animation: Jamie Perera. Conceptualization: Jamie Perera and Emma Schymanski, with inputs from Dagny Aurich and Paul Thiessen.

Our Chemical Past, Present And Future

Workshop meditation with Jamie Perera and Felipe Viveros at the Artivism Inaugural Global Conference.

Dynamic meditation, it will be confronting at times, also gentle etc.

Tune in, Listen with your bodies, allow yourself to move into different spaces.

Can you feel when identity flows / changes? 

Can you feel when you are in multiple spaces? Multiple degrees of formation?

How does that affect our self perception, how does it change as we become part of the world?

MANIFESTX ARTIVISM MEDITATION

A piece created from plant data with Wild Alchemy Lab's Jemma Foster on the Oneiric Soils Residency 2023 in Kos, Greece.

Tracks by Jamie Perera